


When You're Going Through Hell

by shadesfalcon



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Ableism, Abuse, Alternate Universe - High School, Angry Natasha Romanov, Angst, Anorexia Mention, Bullying, Child Abuse, Deaf Clint Barton, Domestic Violence, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Violence, Neglect, Swearing, so much of it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-08
Updated: 2015-12-26
Packaged: 2018-04-19 18:06:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 33,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4756028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadesfalcon/pseuds/shadesfalcon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha seems like she has the perfect life, with a rich father who doesn't care what she does with her time and a mother MIA. She must be thrilled! Totally psyched to never have anyone wondering where she is at night. It must be wonderful to be able to do whatever you want.</p><p>Somehow, Clint doubts it, if only because he can see the red lines on her palms from where she clenches her fists just a little too tight. He might not have many friends - or any friends, really - but he knows what a slow-burning rage looks like when he sees it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vermiIIions](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vermiIIions/gifts).



It wasn’t that Clint couldn’t make friends. It was that he didn’t want to.

It had nothing to do with the dirty farm boy layer of dust that clung to everything he wore and touched. It had nothing to do with his haphazard reckless lack of concern for physical consequences. Nothing to do with the thinly veiled anger waiting beneath deceptively apathetic features.

Halfway through his junior year of high school, Clint sat alone at his lunch table, twirling an empty water bottle he’d grabbed from the parking lot. Round and round and round, tip-tipping against his fingers and the plastic tabletop. He was watching Mindy Harrington laughing with her friends. As if sensing his stare, she glanced up, and the two of them made eye-contact. For a half-second of insanity, he thought that she was going to say something.

But then she returned to her conversation and Clint slouched deeper in his chair.

“Mind if I sit here?” a voice interrupted his wandering mind. He twisted around, without sitting up any straighter, to see who was stupid enough to want to sit with him. It was a girl he hadn’t seen before, which was a big enough deal for this high school.

The first thing he noticed was her bright red hair, curling around her face like a shampoo add, but the second thing was what kept his attention. Her eyes—flecked green and very bright—were watching him with an intensity that he didn’t even get from teachers on exam days.

Belatedly, he realized that her question had been tinted with a slight Eastern European accent. Not a lot, but enough that Clint had picked up on it.

Poor girl. Palisade High was awful enough without an accent. He gestured to the table in acquiescence, and she quickly took her seat.

As he watched her move gracefully, Clint felt a slight tinge of bitterness that, foreign origins aside, she’d be fitting in in no time. Pretty girls with piercing stares and devil-may-care attitudes always found their place eventually.

He went back to spinning his empty bottle.

“Natasha,” the girl said suddenly, unpacking her lunch from her backpack. “Since you didn’t ask.”

“Clint,” he responded. It was the end of their interaction for the day.

Looking back, Clint wondered how he couldn’t have known, right then and there.

***

She came back the next day. Clint had gotten ahold of some scrap paper and was doodling around its outer edges in large circles, and then suddenly there was Natasha. She didn’t arrive. She simply appeared, picking at the mass-produced meat patty with general disdain.

“Natasha,” he greeted her.

“Clint,” she shot back. Because Clint couldn’t help but feel that they’d somehow started a battle. Which might not be a wise move on his part. Not when he considered the very real possibility that she’d soon find herself in a position of power within the school’s social hierarchy.

“Have a nice morning?” They both had Spanish during first period, and were both in Mr. Becket’s math class last period, but that was the extent of their possible contact. And they hadn’t spoken to each other since lunch the day before.

“Well enough,” she answered.

The response didn’t seem like a call arms, but it didn’t seem like a truce either, so he ran his hand over his mouth and sat forward in his seat.

“Just ‘well enough,’ huh?”

She eyed him in silence as she took a bite of the questionable meat.

Strike two.

“You didn’t bring a lunch today? Because, um, yesterday…” He trailed off, gesturing to her tray.

“Wanted to see what it was like,” she answered, mouth full, and Clint breathed in relief when she pulled the conversation along on her own.

“What’s the verdict?”

“I’ve had worse,” she shrugged.

“Fair enough.”

He returned to his doodles, pleased that he’d diffused whatever situation had been brewing, and with no intention to ever talk to the girl again. She’d be far away from his table in no time.

She seemed to agree, since she made no move to restart the conversation and, in fact, pulled out a textbook.

So she was a “studies during lunch” kind of a girl. Smart and pretty. Yeah, she was going to fit in just fine.

***

Which meant, the next day, that the spark of anger Clint had been nursing since he’d woken up, flared brightly when the stupid girl sat down across from him yet again.

He stiffly said nothing at all, though he did watch her as he fiddled with his phone. If she wanted to sit there in silence, he was damn well going to let her.

***

He held out until the next day, when she predictably flipped that same book open on the table. He made himself wait until her brow furrowed in concentration, and then he flicked the bottle cap he’d been playing with across the table. It hit her book and popped up a few inches into the air, falling back to bounce along the table and finally down onto the floor.

She didn’t move for a moment, as though trying to decide if the action was worth the energy she would have to expend on social interaction. And then she looked up with a withering glare. Her eyes tracked over his face and down his body, contemplating him. He contemplated her right back.

She wore the kind of clothes that said “money” even if they didn’t have visible brand names. The diamond studs in her ears were probably real, and she’d brought home lunches ever since that one attempt at the cafeteria. The meals she brought were carefully packed by hand. No lunchables or convenience store sandwiches. Real meals with rice and lemonade and slices of homemade cherry pie.

“Are you deaf?” she asked suddenly, and the cocky grin Clint had been plastering on, faded just as quickly as he’d thrown it up.

“Close enough,” he muttered, suddenly acutely aware of the prominent hearing aids in either ear. He bit the inside of his cheek and stared at a point somewhere off to Natasha’s left, waiting for the other shoe to drop. If she went after his being deaf, then he was going to throw something heavier than a bottle cap at her.

But the silence stretched on, and she didn’t seem to be offering any more commentary on his hearing aids.

Still, the effort he’d gathered to expend on the situation had been burned out by that one brief flare of panic. He stared down at his own empty tray, eventually made some excuse about a meeting with a teacher, and hurried to slip away.

It was the last time that Natasha would sit at his table. In fact, for the rest of the semester, and then the summer after, they wouldn’t exchange more than two words.

Natasha went on to join the popular crowd, just like Clint had predicted. She made friends with Steve Captain-of-the-football-team Rogers and Tony if-he-cared-at-all-about- standardized-tests-he-could-be-in-college-by-now Stark. She fit into their world seamlessly, with a red-lipstick smile and a clap on the back.

Clint watched them from afar, with the same wistful intensity that he watched the rest of the school. Though, if his eyes lingered a little longer on the way Natasha’s lips curved when she was truly laughing too hard for self-control, then who could blame him?

It was a happy and languid year.

But it was a long summer. It was hot and violent and lonely, wearing away at the carefully contrived resolution of both the young teens. By the time they entered the school building the following fall – air still tasting like the melting heat – Natasha’s smile had faded from view. Instead, her polished fingernails were sharp and cutting at her own palms with the strength of her tightened fists.

Clint saw. He saw on that first day of school from where he stood behind Natasha, watching her hesitate on the steps of the school.

He almost said something. He almost asked her what was wrong. What had happened over the three months of heat waves and cloudless skies?

But it was Natasha Fucking Romanoff.

And the bell was about to ring.

He put his head down and marched forward, plunging into the upcoming year of hell with all the bravado of a wet cat.

He didn’t see Natasha’s gaze shift from the front door of the school to Clint, as he passed her. Her eyes, weary and sunken, narrowed with the finality of an acquired target.

“Clint Barton,” she murmured to herself. “I hear you know what it’s like to go through hell.”

After all, even Dante thought it prudent to call on a guide.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It took me long enough to get to this, but I've been trying to work it out forever, and I guess we're finally here. (Thanks, Jade!)
> 
> Short chapter for the opening prologue, but I have high hopes that this will run away with me.


	2. Meet and Greet

Clint hadn’t been paying attention. That was the problem with turning off his hearing aids. Yes, the world finally faded away to an annoying buzz, and yes the dull underwater noises were sometimes the best choice, but it all still meant sacrificing that full-body awareness which had become crucial to surviving high school.

Brock narrowed in on Clint with the radar for helplessness that only true tormentors seemed to posses. The first Clint knew of it was a heavy hand clapping on his back and Brock settling himself into the chair on his right. He rushed to turn his hearing aids back on. He was about to be at enough of a disadvantage as it was.

“Clint!” Brock crowed. “Long time, no see. How was your summer?”

Clint should have expected this. Steve was absent today. All bets were off.

“It was just about like every other summer.” He turned to slide out of the chair and stand, but Grant, right on cue, settled into the chair on Clint’s left, cutting off an easy escape.

Grant smiled aimlessly, probably not really paying attention to the situation. He didn’t have the sadistic strain that Brock had, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t play mean if pushed into it.

“I’m not in the mood,” Clint warned them. There was a darkening bruise at the bottom of his ribcage on his left side. He could feel it when he breathed. He could feel it when he curled in on himself. And if this kept up he’d feel it when he twisted his body to the right for a sharp left hook to Brock’s jaw.

He let the tension show in the muscles in his neck while he stared at the blank table in front of him. He glanced over to Grant, who wasn’t even looking at him, watching someone else behind Clint moving through the cafeteria.

Clint should have known better than to take his eyes off Brock. He felt the hearing aid slide out of his ear too quickly for his hands to fly up and catch it.

“Just wanted to make sure I had your attention,” Brock murmured, and Clint had to turn his head to make sure he caught everything.

It upped the ante to just out of comfort zone. A generic fight – a generic suspension – Clint would have faced. But this was too delicate. His mom had lost her job over the summer. There was no insurance to cover a replacement.

“Brock,” Grand soothed from Clint’s left. _Him_ , Clint could still hear. “That’s like, destruction of property or something, I’m pretty sure.”

“I just wanted to make sure he was paying attention to me.”

Clint clenched his fists on the table in front of him.

“Tell you what,” Brock continued. “I’ll give it back if you can repeat after me.”

“God, Brock, you’re such an ass,” Grant snorted.

“God, Brock, you’re such an ass,” Clint echoed, letting his eyes smirk.

Brock’s eyes narrowed, and he made a half move to stand up, but Grant stood more quickly and put his hand on his friend’s shoulder.

“Not worth it,” Grant said. “Besides, technically he did as he was told.”

“Told him to repeat after _me_ ,” Brock snarled. “Little shit.” But he tossed the hearing aid down on the table anyway, then stalked away with Grant in tow. As he went, he muttered, “It’s not like the fucker can report it anyway.”

 _Deaf, not mute, asshat_ , Clint seethed. Though Brock was still right. He wasn’t going to report it.

He scooped his hearing aid up off the table and yanked the other one out of his ear, too, burying them both deep in the inner pocket of his backpack. It wasn’t like he could duct tape them to his ears.

***

That might have been the end of it.

Thank god that it wasn’t.

***

After lingering in the classroom at the end of the hour, both to let the hallways clear and to make sure he’d gotten the homework assignment right, Clint quick-walked through the building, heading for the exit. There was no one to come and get him if he missed the bus. He took a corner especially quickly and had to backpedal to keep from slamming into Brock.

“Geez,” Clint seethed. “Some guys just can’t take a hint.”

“What the fuck did you say?” Brock snapped, almost unintelligible with the way anger twisted his mouth. The hearing aids had gone back in his bag the moment class had ended. It meant they couldn’t be grabbed out of his ears. But it also meant that his adversary only had to get ahold of his backpack.

Clint turned to run, but his witty comment had cost him his timing, and Grant had already moved into place behind him.

“Just let him have his fun,” Grant soothed. “Don’t antagonize him. You know how he gets.”

Which was all well and good for Grant to say. He wasn’t the one trying to figure out if he’d pissed off the local bully enough to earn a punch to the face. Sometimes Brock went for the psychological torture. Sometimes he just cut corners. It depended on how pissed off he was, and Clint had a bad habit of pissing people off.

“Let him have his fun?” Clint echoed emptily. He stepped sideways quickly, when he saw the movement of shadow along the locker. It kept him out of arm’s reach for a few seconds longer, but Grant did have a point. Refusing to play along meant riling up the monster.

“Listen here you little shit,” Brock began. And that was as far as he got.

Clint would swear later that he’d closed his eyes, but that was a lie. He saw Natasha come into the field of vision. She came around the same corner he had, but with a whole new intensity of purpose. Clint remembered thinking that she was heading somewhere important, and that she’d be surprised to see the gaggle of people in the hallway. She’d probably be pissed that she had to take a few extra steps. She’d probably glance at Clint’s predicament and keep walking.

Wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Natasha planted her foot and threw a punch that took her whole body along with it. Brock made a brief noise of surprise that quickly became a noise of pain, and then he hit the floor, mouth open and gaping and bleeding. Which was when Natasha kicked him in the side.

“Hey!” Grant exclaimed, moving in to help his friend. He grabbed a hold of Natasha’s shoulder and jerked her backward.

Natasha used the moment to change her velocity, dropping her shoulder out of Grant’s grasp and twisting his arm. Then she did something with her legs and her weight and suddenly Grant was on the floor, Natasha straddled on top of him. And punching. And still punching.

Clint finally gave in and ran to catch her arm. He wasn’t sure what her problem with the two guys was, but he couldn’t justify watching someone get their nose jammed back into their brain right in front of him. Because that was the track Natasha was on.

At the first touch of him against her arm, she jerked around and Clint took several shuffling steps back, but he still managed to say, “Stop.”

She did.

She looked back down at Grant and said, “You got the message?”

“What did we do?” Brock asked from behind her, as he scrambled to his feet. He was holding his side awkwardly, and Clint realized he probably now had a bruise in the same place Clint did.

Grant didn’t say anything. He didn’t look like he was anywhere near the edge of coherency as he coughed and sputtered.

“What did you do?” Natasha repeated, incredulous and looking over her shoulder at the speaker. “That’s Clint Barton!”

What the fuck. That was his name.

“Yeah?” Brock said, slowly, side-eyeing Clint.

“He’s one of mine. Don’t fucking touch my stuff,” Natasha spat.

Clint turned and picked up his backpack and walked away. He wasn’t touching this one. Not with a 10-foot pole. Not with any pole. This nightmare of a day couldn’t be going anywhere good and he had a bus to catch.

Actually, he’d probably missed the bus already.

Shit.

He kept walking anyway. He kept walking even when he heard Natasha’s running footsteps come to catch up with him. He kept walking even when she fell into pace beside him. He did speak, though.

“I’m not your property,” he said. He meant it to come out angry, but it was just empty. Like everything else.

“What?” Natasha responded, then seemed to realize. “Oh! That! Don’t worry about that. That’s just a…thing. I don’t know. I say the same thing about the rest of my group.”

“I’m not in your group.”

Natasha just made a humming noise.

“I’m not in your group!” Clint repeated, more forcefully. “And I think you broke Grant’s nose.”

“I know I broke Grant’s nose,” she responded, looking down at her knuckles which she flexed and extended her fingers. “I felt it go. Heard it crack.”

There was blood smudged across her skin where Grant’s nose had bled.

“What do you want, Natasha?” Clint asked wearily.

Natasha seemed to consider the question, like she didn’t already have something in mind. She pursed her lips, reaching out to open the front door as they reached the steps.

“What I want,” she stated, “isn’t the kind of thing you can wish for on birthday candles. It’s a little more complicated than that.”

“I have no idea what that means,” Clint said, glancing around the front of the school. “And I missed my bus.”

“Don’t be stupid. I’ll drive you,” Natasha scoffed.

Clint followed after her, because what else could he do?

“Hey,” he said, just as they were climbing into her car. “You lost your accent. It was Russian, or something, right?”

Natasha looked at him for a moment, over the top of her car, and then climbed in without another word.

Clint followed, and let the subject drop.

***

The car ride was a nightmare and a half. Natasha didn’t said anything for a long time, just long enough that Clint thought he’d get through the whole thing in silence, but then she took a deep breath and Clint had to dig into his backpack for his hearing aids after all. Hard to read lips when the speaker has to keep her eyes on the road.

“Sorry,” Natasha said once they were in, then continued, “About a lot of things actually. Sorry you had to deal with those guys.”

“Sorry you nearly beat a guy to death in front of me?”

“Nope.”

Clint turned so he could lean back against the passenger door and really look at her. She sat straight, without touching the back of her seat. She still wore “money” clothes, and those earrings probably cost more than Clint’s monthly budget, but there was something else, too. A tension in her shoulders and the set of her jaw. A dishevelment.

“Did something happen?” he asked.

Natasha made a sound of disbelief and responded, “Um, yes? I beat the shit out of a couple of guys. Hurt my hand.”

“You should get that looked at. It’s easy to break bones when you punch stuff repeatedly.”

“I didn’t break anything.”

“You might not _know_ ,” Clint muttered. “You can’t always tell.”

“I’ve broken fingers punching stuff before. I know what it feels like. I know I’m fine.”

Clint contemplated that a few times, but then couldn’t let it go and said, “You’ve what?”

“I took martial arts for years, Clint. My whole life. Until last year, anyway.”

“What made you stop?”

“The same thing that brought me to a public high school,” Natasha sighed, turning the wheel to pull to the curb outside Clint’s house.

“You gonna elaborate?”

“Not today,” clipped, nodded toward Clint’s house with obvious intention.

So Clint got out.

He probably should have asked how she knew his address, but he didn’t.

Not that he wasn’t concerned. He just didn’t think to ask.

***

The next morning found everyone a bit wound up, Clint especially. He shuffled off the bus and up the school steps. He took a roundabout way to get to his class, just so he could walk by the hallway where Grant and Brock had eaten the floor. The blood was gone, presumably cleaned by the staff.

He wondered if Natasha would get in trouble. He honestly didn’t know if those two were the type to tell, although he doubted it in the particular circumstances. Natasha looked like she weighed 120 pounds soaking wet. Clint wouldn’t have thought she could win in a fight against those two guys. Not before yesterday. The two of them certainly wouldn’t be eager for the news to spread.

He turned a corner and practically ran into Natasha and Steve. Steve was leaning one shoulder against a locker, looking down at Natasha and saying something about weekend plans. He looked at ease, speaking to the redhead. At Clint’s awkward shuffle dance, he glanced up, nodded a greeting, and attempted to return to his conversation.

Natasha was not so easily drawn back into dialogue.

“Clint,” she greeted. “Wait up a second.” She turned back to Steve and said, “Hey, I’m not gonna be there, ok. Just, have fun without me. I’ve got some family stuff to take care of.”

“Family stuff?” Steve echoed, while Clint hovered in the hallway, unsure how seriously to take her order to wait. “Like, bad family stuff?”

“Is there any other kind?” Natasha laughed. “Seriously though, don’t worry about it. I’ll talk to you later.” Then she turned and joined Clint, drawing him to walk down the hall.

“What do you need?” he greeted.

“Well aren’t you well-versed in morning pleasantries,” Natasha returned. “How about a ‘good morning’ or something?”

“Good morning,” Clint sighed.

“Wow, Barton. Always do whatever you’re told. Maybe mix it up once in awhile.”

Clint threw his hands in the air and rolled his eyes. “Look, if you’re just going to mess with me, then congrats on joining the rest of this God-forsaken school. Also, fuck off.”

Natasha quirked an eyebrow, and Clint had enough time to consider the wisdom of telling someone like Natasha to fuck off. She’d just pounded a couple guys who weighed 200-plus into the tile just for….

Just for him.

“What do you want?” Clint asked, more wearily this time.

“I want to hang out.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do. Don’t tell me what I want.”

“You haven’t said two words to me since your first week here. Why now?”

“Don’t look at it too hard,” Natasha began, but Clint stopped and turned on his heel to get right in her face. He took her upper arm roughly with one hand, squeezing a little too tightly. He tried to remind himself that she’d beaten the hell out of a couple guys better at fighting than he was, but he couldn’t make himself back down. There was something here. Something right underneath the bullshit she was spewing.

“Why, now?” he repeated, softly, but with all the intensity of his loneliness behind it.

They were turning heads in the hallways. The two of them were hanging still, minutes before the first bell, and people whose names Clint could barely remember were watching them in their moment of silence.

“Because people talk about you,” Natasha breathed. Her throat didn’t even really give the words sound, instead giving them to Clint by the shape of her lips. Words for him, and no one else. “Because if half of the things that people say about you are true, then you know what it’s like.”

“I know what what’s like?”

“To go through hell. You know what it’s like to go through hell and, if not to come out the other side, then you at least know how to keep going.”

A long silence between them.

Then, “Are you going through hell, Natasha?”

She snorted then, rolling her eyes and taking a step back, breaking the moment.

“Seems stupid, doesn’t it?” she mocked herself. “How could I possibly be going through hell? I mean, haven’t you heard?” She smiled bitterly. “I’m the girl who has everything.”

She seemed to hesitate, barely, to see if Clint would come up with something else to add, but when he couldn’t capitalize on the barely-there moment, she turned to walk away.

Clint almost let it go. People like Natasha were followed by intensity. Whatever was happening in her life, it would never be dull. Her happiness would be elation and her pain would be despair. There was no in-between with girls like Natasha, and Clint wasn’t sure his over-sensitized soul could handle the brush against her.

But he’d held her arm in his fingers, and she’d been trembling in his hand.

“Wait up!,” he called, running the few steps to catch up with her. “What did you have in mind? ‘Cause I like pizza and shit, but I don’t know if you meant hang out like that, or at lunch, or what.”

“We can have pizza, on one condition,” Natasha said, and all the almost-vulnerability in her voice was gone.

“Anything.”

“We have it at my house. I’ll drive.”

And it made sense that she didn’t want to pal around with him in public, but it still made Clint regret his ‘anything.’ Because he knew the neighborhood that Natasha lived in, and that wasn’t the kind of place he could go in clothes like his and not get security called on him.

But he’d said ‘anything’.

“Meet you in the parking lot,” he grinned. Then ducked into his classroom just as the bell rang. The surprise on her face made him laugh, as she turned to sprint for her own classroom.

***

The drive there was wild. Natasha took down the top, rolled down the windows, and blared the music. Clint wanted to stand up on the seat and scream with the youthful freedom of it all. They hit the highway at 80 mph and the wind forced his yell back down his throat but it didn’t stop him from trying. It was so much that even breathing in and out was a fight, but he met the fight with reckless abandon because just let the world touch him right now.

He was in Natasha Romanoff’s passenger seat and, no matter what was coming, for now he was brilliantly and vibrantly alive.

***

“You look debauched,” Natasha smirked, when Clint climbed out of the car. Clint barely heard her, focusing on the mansion in front of his eyes. A driver had taken the car into the garage for them. A fucking driver, like a chauffeur or something.

“You do not live here,” he gaped. “People don’t live in places like this.”

Natasha shrugged, drawing him up the steps and into the atrium. Because the house had a fucking atrium.

“It’s just a building,” she said.

“Thus speaks the rich,” Clint scoffed. Any further commentary was cut off by a woman coming in from the house to join them.

“Mrs. Romanoff?” Clint asked, and Natasha made a strange sound behind him at the same time that the woman’s mouth opened a little in shock.

“No. Goodness, no,” the woman laughed. “I’m Emma. I look after Natasha here, when she lets me.”

“I don’t make it easy for you,” Natasha quipped.

“So you say,” Emma smiled, then motioned at Clint to come further into the house. “I got your text, and the pizza’s just coming out of the oven. I’ll bring it up to your room in a few moments.”

 _Homemade pizza?_ Clint mouthed to Natasha who giggled, and took him by the hand to draw him yet again further in. This time it was down a hallway and up a staircase, down another hall, and around a corner into an alcove of a room.

The room itself was mostly circle, with the walls making a multi-sided polygon, many of the sides floor-to-ceiling windows. Everything was full of light and, when he followed Natasha’s lead to toe off his shoes, the carpet was warm underneath his feet.

The objects in the room were meticulously arranged. The perfectly-made bed was white and gold on the left of the room, and the rest of the furniture was white and avant-garde. Curling metal desk legs and curling gothic designs around the mirror frame. The only real color in the room was the blood red curtains, reflecting a dark shadow into the corners of the room.

Natasha dropped her backpack by her desk, the sloppy tilt of it breaking the spell of the room for long enough that Clint could draw in a deep breath.

“So,” she asked. “What do you want to do?”

Any possible answer Clint might have come up with was interrupted by Emma’s reappearance, carrying an actual pizza with little cups of ranch dressing balanced on the edges of the tray.

“Thanks,” Natasha said, taking the tray and setting it on the floor.

“Do not get grease on that carpet,” Emma warned.

“Yes, ma’am,” Clint answered automatically, getting himself a laugh and a “oh I like him” as Emma exited the room again.

“Help yourself,” Natasha said, and Clint hurried to do so, if only because it would stave off the conversation for a few more minutes.

The slice he pulled out was heavy and hot, enough so that he had to keep shifting his fingers around to keep from burning the tips of them. Steam rose from the cheese, and he hurried to dunk the tip in the ranch, then shoved it eagerly into his mouth.

He almost spit it back out the moment it hit his tongue.

“What?” Natasha asked, raising her eyebrows in concern.

Clint opted not to answer right away, instead laying the pizza gently back down on the tray. Then he dipped his pinky in the ranch cup and carefully licked it.

“This is hot,” he said, making a _blech_ face. “What the fuck?”

“I like it hot,” Natasha said defensively.

“You like your ranch dressing hot? What the actual fuck?! Do you put it in the microwave or some shit? That is the most disgusting thing I’ve put in my mouth in years! Don't get me wrong, the pizza itself is awesome, but what the hell, Natasha?”

“It’s not that bad,” Natasha pouted.

"It's an affront to nature.”

He was laughing. He couldn’t help it. The surreal aura of the last 24 hours had been building up to an inevitable peak where something would shatter, but the growing tension had suddenly been melted away by Natasha’s inexorable preference.

“You like your ranch dressing heated up,” he scoffed again, unable to keep from repeating the ridiculously mundane phrase. She was watching him with growing amusement, as he just kept laughing harder and harder.

“What?” she asked. “I don’t get it, what are you laughing at? It’s not that funny!”

But how could he explain the sudden humanity? How could he articulate that her vague “otherness” had suddenly been disrupted by her taste preferences. The same way everyone has that one thing they like and everyone else thinks is gross. The sheer homogeneous nature of humanity bleeding through even in its individuality.

There were no words.

So instead he just said, “It’s nice to meet you, by the way.”

She smiled slowly, in the face of his inexplicable joy.

“It’s nice to meet you, too.”


	3. Lest I Lose You

He hadn’t anticipated the rest of the group. On some level, sitting on Natasha’s bedroom floor, he’d come to accept that they were now a part of each other’s lives. Somehow - and without his consent, he might add - they’d plunged over that particular cliff, and he didn’t have the energy to climb back out. It was done.

And then he found himself standing at The Table in the cafeteria at lunch the next morning, and the entire idea suddenly became ridiculous again.

“Hang on,” Clint managed, glancing around for any possible excuse. Natasha had her fingers wrapped very firmly around his arm and she was tugging with a bruising intensity.

“What are you?” she griped. “A startled colt? Move!”

Her persistence paid off and Clint’s hip inevitably bumped the edge of the table. It was apparently finally enough to announce his position to the rest of the group because all eyes popped up to him and Natasha.

“Nat,” Steve nodded. “Who’s your friend?”

“Clint,” Natasha announced, settling into a seat and leaving Clint no choice except to join her.

“Clint?” Tony interjected, his eyebrows drawing together as he looked Clint up and down. “This is the guy who started that fight in the hallway?”

“Oh my god,” Clint muttered, sliding down low in his chair in a half-hearted attempt to disappear.

“Hey,” Natasha snapped. “First of all, he’s right here, so how about you talk to him, and second of all I started that fight, so fuck off.”

Tony put up his hands and drew himself back a little, saying, “Hold off on the fire lady, I just meant that he doesn’t really have that reputation.” He turned a little to face Clint directly and repeated, “You don’t really have that reputation.”

“Well, like she said,” Clint added gesturing with his head. “She started it. And finished it actually.”

At that, Steve’s body tensed, but Tony’s whole face lit up.

“I know right?” he crowed. “She’s bad ass! This one time, Bruce and I were trying to get ahold of this one engine part that was suuuuper out of date, but I needed it for reasons. Or, Bruce needed it for reasons. I forget.”

“If it was engine related,” Bruce said, coming up behind Tony and setting down his tray, “then it was probably you.”

“Sure, whatever,” Tony said, waving his hand dismissively. “Either way, we find out this one junk yard has it, but they won’t deal with ‘kids’ like us.”

“Tony,” Steve said. “Maybe don’t tell this story so loudly.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Natasha snorted. “Are you upset by our tales of illegal activities.” She raised her voice a little, making Steve wince and glance around. “Is Steve “I’ve-kidnapped-someone-before” Rogers, concerned by my breaking and entering.”

“God, _shut up_ ,” Steve snapped, though no one was really paying attention to them,

Clint felt isolated. He’d been dragged here without really being asked, and now the conversation was swinging all around him with the structured chaos of adolescence, and he was having trouble keeping up. Had Natasha just accused Steve of kidnapping?

The cafeteria was loud, and he was having trouble picking out the sounds he wanted and the ones he didn’t. Worse, he was being ignored. He hated being ignored like this. As though the fact that he was struggling to access the world meant he didn’t deserve to succeed.

“So, Clint,” Steve said, making him jump visible.

“What?” Clint asked, a little too sharply.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you there. I wanted to ask, how’d you get involved with Natasha there?”

“Ask her,” Clint snorted.

“Nah, I’m asking you,” Steve persisted. “I have a feeling I can guess her side of the story. I’ve heard rumors. I want to hear it from you.”

“There’s not really a story. She came around the corner like a storm and wiped the floor with some guys who were giving me a hard time. Impressive, really, but I’m still not sure why she did it.”

“Not sure why she did it, huh?” Steve asked, looking past him to quirk an eyebrow at Natasha. “I bet I can come up with a couple theories.”

“Steve, shut up or I will make you eat your own tongue.” Natasha had her lips pursed and Clint was startled to find she was blushing.

Steve leaned in to Clint conspiratorially and whispered, “The thing you’ve got to learn about Natasha? She wears her heart on her sleeve. You just gotta work really hard to learn her tells, because damn are they subtle.” Then he leaned back up to speak at normal volume and added, “Also, I doubt you’d find I eat pavement as easily as Grant or Brock.”

“Challenge accepted,” Natasha crowed.

Overwhelmed, Clint thought to himself. The word for the moment was overwhelmed.

***

Things calmed down again after school was out. Clint hadn’t been sure what the actual plans had been – whether they were done for the day or if the group was doing something or if it would just be the two of them – but the truth turned out to be the last. Natasha beckoned him to her car the moment they broke through the school doors into the sunlight.

She said something that Clint didn’t quite catch and he hurried a few steps to fall into stride with her and ask for a repetition.

She turned to face him, walking sideways to keep herself facing him, and said, “What do you want to do? The world is our oyster, my treat.”

“The world is our oyster,” Clint repeated to himself. “Well, that’s a new one.”

***

The sign language was unexpected. Clint was only a few skill sets into Natasha’s ever-expanding repertoire, but he was already starting to catch on that she had a lot of eclectic knowledge and abilities. It still didn’t prepare him from idly looking over at her during math and suddenly seeing her sign, _I’m so bored_.

He cocked his head to the side, widening his eyes in surprise.

Before he could respond, she added, _why am I here?_ with an exaggerated eye roll.

Then the teacher turned back around from the board and she hurried to face straight ahead again and stare forward with rapt attention.

The next time the Mr. Aimes turned back to write on the board, however, Clint was ready. Before Natasha could beat him to speaking, he signed, _fold origami_.

She rolled her eyes at that, but the next time he looked over she had a pair of matching swans sitting on either corner of her desk as she spun a pencil idly between her fingers and stared at the ceiling tiles.

***

Weeks passed. Sometimes Clint considered finally asking her why the sudden change of heart – the sudden blood in the hallway – but then she’d do something beautiful, and he’d chicken out.

Like the time he worked up the courage and then she took them to the biggest pool Clint had ever seen and threw herself off the high dive over and over again. Every time, her body twisted in a new way but hit the water at the same angle.

“I’ve never seen someone so completely in charge of their own movements,” he told her, leaning over the edge of the pool. He swam poorly, having never learned, and had no intention of getting in and demonstrating that fact to her.

Like the time he worked up the courage and she stole one of her dad’s cars out of the garage drove it out into the middle of nowhere, breaking every speed limit there was. Going so fast that the momentum took his breath away, even with the top up.

“Where are we going?” he screamed over the radio, but she just shook her head with pursed lips.

Like the time he got up the courage and she brought him to a party with so many people, but didn’t abandon him to the corner of the room or the edge of the conversation. Instead, she drew him in with beckoning fingers and jokes repeated in his ear when they flew by too quickly for him to catch. He couldn’t catch anything, not when he was watching her. Not when he was entranced by how she tossed her hair.

She tossed it differently depending on her mood.

Steve was right. She had a thousand tells. They were just tiny things, folded away in bigger movements that served as a distraction.

It didn’t matter how often he got up the courage. There was just another incident waiting for him. Waiting to plunge him back into homeostasis. Why risk everything? Why risk this? Why court disaster when he was finally getting up the first time his alarm went off? When he wasn’t adding up the calories in his head and doing math problems twice to keep his mind off his hunger.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked him. They were lying in the bed of a random truck in the mall and the owner was going to come out at any minute and who knew what would happen then, but it didn’t matter because fall was turning the leaves and the wind was bringing them down.

“You,” he answered truthfully.

***

She had him break into her house.

Well, nothing so dramatic as that really. But she did demand that he make her way to her house at two o’clock in the morning. He was going to have to add some gas to the car on the way back or his mom would realize that he’d been out. If she hadn’t woken at the sound of the ignition.

When he got to the neighborhood in question, he parked a ways away and walked the rest of the distance. She met him at the gate, wearing shorts and a t-shirt with an open robe hanging off one shoulder. She dragged him up the hill and over the lawn, leaving barefoot footprints in the grass. Then she grasped the latticework on the south side of her house and began to climb.

Clint doubted the structural integrity of the woodwork, but he followed nonetheless.

They ended up on the roof, where she’d set up polar fleece blankets to ward against the coming winter, and they watched the stars until the sun peered above the horizon and Natasha fell asleep on his chest. He was afraid to move, lest the moment shatter.

But the rise of the sun brought a changing pressure that swept through the air in the form of wind, chilling whatever it touched, biting through even the blankets draped around them. Natasha shivered and drew in closer.

“It’s cold,” she whined.

“Well, yeah, it’s October,” Clint answered.

“Fix it!”

Clint sighed heavily and wrapped the blankets around just her rather than them both. Then he tucked his arms under her legs and behind her shoulders and lifted her bridle-style. The sudden vertical position allowed the full brunt of the wind to accost him, and he shivered against the warmth of her body.

“My hero,” she murmured. “So strong. So steady.”

“Well, I don’t mean to brag,” he laughed, “But I can bench press…um…some ridiculous number. I don’t know. I don’t know how it works.”

She laughed, while he wrestled them both through the window into the cupola, and then descended the stairs with her still in his arms. He stumbled through the dark hallway, overcoming a sudden irrational thrill of fear that there would be a guard or a dog, and eventually found her bedroom. He laid her out on the sheets, still wrapped in the blanket.

She grabbed his arm as he drew away, drawing him back, and Clint didn’t argue, lying down next to her on top of the covers. He pulled this hearing aids out to set on the nightstand, and settled in against her, wrapping his arms around her waist to draw her in more tightly.

“Natasha,” he whispered. He couldn’t help it, even though he hadn’t intended to speak, but rather to fall asleep. “What is this? What are we doing?” It was like the moment of confession at a sleepover that has run too late. The words were out of his mouth before he could consider them, before he could wonder if there would be consequences hidden in the answer to the question.

She rolled over on her back so she could sign into the air in the light of the dawn breaking through the window.

 _Don’t be stupid_ , her fingers wrote out for him. _We’re dating. Don’t make it weird._

His hands clenched spasmodically at the nonchalant claim. The arrogance of the assuming without asking him and the chagrin at her being right.

“Natasha,” he whispered again. “Why did you come to me?” She rolled the rest of the way over to look at him in the dark, but he continued, “I know there was a reason. Something you wanted me to do or something you wanted to ask me.”

“It might be stupid now,” she mouthed.

“Just tell me,” he said.

Her face was so close. So pure. She opened her mouth to speak. Drew in a breath to give away a secret, all because he’d asked. Her mouth was open just to capitulate to his request, and he knew there was a dangerous truth just there between her teeth, and she was going to share it with him. All because he’d asked her to.

This was bliss.

This was also the moment Natasha’s father opened the door.

Clint didn’t realize immediately. He was facing away from the hallway, but he saw Natasha’s eyes widen in fear. Saw her gaze shift from him to over his shoulder, and even though he couldn’t hear, he _knew_. Then Natasha reached out her hand as though to stop something, and suddenly Clint felt a fist in the back of his shirt and he was dragged physically from the bed.

For a moment, he was in the air, and then he hit the floor hard and rolled over once, skinning his knee against the carpet. He struggled to his knees in time to see a man, presumably Natasha’s father, stalk back over to the doorway and turn on the lights. It hurt his eyes.

Clint’s heart rate was up too high, panicking in the sudden trigger of a father in his field of vision, screaming about something Clint couldn’t quite make out. He was on his feet before he knew what he was doing, and at the doorway just as quickly.

He managed to stop himself there, though. Natasha’s eyes had widened so quickly. He’d only ever seen her confident and vibrant. Even her angry was hers to control, but that had been fear. Messy fear and maybe hatred.

He wasn’t the little brother in this scenario. He didn’t get to flee for the window and leave someone else to deal with his consequences.

He turned on his heel and managed to take a whole two steps into the room. The man rounded on him, in the moment, yelling about god-knew-what and Clint couldn’t even begin to get himself calm enough to follow.

“I can’t hear you,” he screamed.

A look of confusion then, a glance back at Natasha who scrabbled for the hearing aids on the nightstand. She climbed out of bed then, and circled around her father - who had that generic look of disgust on his face - and handed them over.

Clint put them in his ears and managed to use the moment to lean over and whisper, “Will he hurt you?”

She drew back in surprise and said, “No. Not directly. Not like that.”

Clint nodded once and turned to face the figure in front of him.

“Mr. Romanoff,” he greeted. “Pleased to meet you. I think your daughter’s just great.”

“I’m sure you do,” the man said dryly, having calmed some. “Natasha, you want to tell me why you thought this would be ok? Maybe I need to have a word with Emma? She was good for you when you were young, but if this is what you’re doing with your free time, maybe I need to look into finding someone more suited to the needs of a teenager.”

“You wouldn’t _dare_ ,” Natasha spat from behind Clint, and something shifted across the man’s face as Clint watched. A slight movement of the eyes.

Then Natasha continued, “Clint and I weren’t doing anything, and you’ve never given a fuck what I do before.”

“Watch your language. Now, here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to stay here and get ready for school. I’m going to take your friend down to the atrium and see him off. Then, when I get home tonight, we’re going to have a long talk about the boundaries within my house.”

Natasha’s hand touched Clint’s shoulder, but he turned around and shook his head.

“It’s fine,” he said. “I’m fine. See you at school.”

And then, within the span of a few surreal moments, he was standing in the front room with Mr. Romanoff himself.

“I need to make myself perfectly clear here,” the man said. “All forms of political correctness aside. That is my daughter. And you, from the little I know of you, are not good enough for her.”

Clint made an involuntary noise of surprise, glancing down at his trailer park clothing and worn shoes.

“You want to protest the matter?” Mr. Romanoff continued, obviously expecting a push-back. “You have some breeding in you that would assuage my concerns?”

This was what the guy was concerned about? He’d found a strange boy in bed with his daughter, and his concern was the propriety of the whole thing? Pissed, Clint would have understood. Afraid, would have made sense, too.

But this was…affronted.

Clint stared at the face of the man in front of him and thought about Natasha upstairs, probably hurrying to get ready so as to meet him at school.

“Nah,” Clint shrugged.

“Just ‘nah’? That’s all you have to say?”

“What do you want me to say?” Clint sighed, turning to gesture out over the front lawn. “Look at this. You think I don’t know she’s slumming it? You think I don’t know I’m not good enough? Let _me_ make _myself_ perfectly clear, sir. I am not the endgame. Don’t think for a second that I don’t know that. She’ll get bored. She’ll freak out. She’ll finally talk me into showing her my house, or I’ll say just one too many things that don’t fit within her world. Her friends will take her away in private and say that they’re concerned.”

Mr. Romanoff’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t say anything.

“That doesn’t mean I’m walking away, though,” Clint spat out. “I’m gonna dig my fingers in and hold on, even though I know I’m gonna get shaken off eventually. I can do the math. I’m not how this ends. I am a stepping stone that will be brought up as a ‘phase’ when she whispers pillow-talk to the man she’ll marry. I’m not that smart, but I’m smart enough to know how this ends.”

“But you won’t back off?” Mr. Romanoff said. The question wasn’t angry, or exasperated. Just blank.

“No, sir. I’m not gonna back off. I would never forgive myself. This will be over when she calls it as over. Not one second before, and not one second after. And if you know anything about her, you’ll recognize that you accepting that fact is the fastest way to finish this for everyone.”

A moment of silence while Clint panted with adrenaline.

“Clint, was it?”

Clint startled at hearing his name out loud, but managed to nod.

“Very well, Clint. I guess I’ll see you around.” He reached out for a handshake, and Clint stared at it for a moment, then took it firmly.

“I trust you can find your way home,” Mr. Romanoff said dryly.

“I tend to manage,” Clint shot back. Then turned and marched down the driveway.


	4. Whispers in the Dark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh there, THERE'S the angst we've been missing in this work.  
> Also, TW: for non-graphic descriptions of physical and psychological abuse of a teenager

 

 

 

When Clint sat down at lunch that afternoon, he wrapped his arm around Natasha’s shoulders, scooting their chairs closer together to better accommodate the gesture. She looked startled when he did it, which made sense since he rarely was the one to initiate contact between them.

But he’d looked her father in the eye and declared his intentions, as much as they were. He was done playing half-steps. So he leaned back in his chair and drew her closer in to him, snarling “ _mine_ ” at the world.

She looked at him in inquiry, but he crossed his leg, ankle-on-knee, and nodded a greeting at Steve. Eventually, she just accepted it.

***

The next few weeks hung everything in stasis. Clint became more comfortable with the rest of Natasha’s friends, and the group accepted him with the same understanding with which Clint accepted them. It was an inevitable component of following in Natasha’s wake. You took her or you didn’t – all or nothing, come hell or high water.

To be honest, Clint had expected to have a problem with Tony, though, in retrospect, he might have expected better from Natasha. The kid had a high-strung self-destructive streak, but he was as far from malicious as someone could get. In his own way, he was gentle.

Bruce was also gentle, although in a different way. Clint got the feeling that the kid was listening to everything that was said – storing the memories away – even though he always seemed to be staring off into the distance.

It was Steve, though, that Clint found the most unfathomable. To be honest, Clint had always kind of hated the senior. He ran in Brock’s crowd, even though he hadn’t ever participated in the torture Clint had seen go down around the school. Still, it meant Steve had been classified somewhere in the “asshole” category of Clint’s class roster.

However, the few interactions they’d had weren’t terrible. The guy seemed nice enough. But he also didn’t open up to Clint the way the others did. Even Bruce, quiet though he was, left Clint with an impression.

Steve was just quiet stillness. Until, suddenly, he wasn’t.

“What’s up with Rogers?” Clint asked Natasha one day. They were lounging by her indoor pool - she in a red bathing suit and he in shorts and a t-shirt - when he asked, and she made the effort to actually sit up at his question. She pulled her sunglasses down with one hand, so she could peer over them at him.

“Rogers?” she mocked. “Last name basis, over there? Are you soldiers now?”

“Sorry. Steve. Whatever. Sorry I asked.”

“No, no,” Natasha said, turning her body and swinging her legs out off the edge of the pool chair. She pushed her sunglasses up on the top of her head and stared right at him. “Tell me what’s on your mind enough that you called our friend by his last name.”

Clint shrugged. He should have known better than to start a conversation like this without figuring out what he wanted to say beforehand.

“I’m not going to let it go,” Natasha warned him. “You might as well give in now.”

“I don’t know, ok,” Clint sighed, exasperated. “I’m not even sure what I’m trying to say here. I’m not sure what I was asking.”

Natasha stared at him for a moment, while he stubbornly stared out over the pool, but she eventually pulled her sunglasses down again and laid back in the chair.

“Maybe you two just need to get to know each other a little better,” she said.

“Natasha, please don’t force me out on a bro-date or anything.”

“Bro-date?” Natasha snorted. “The fuck is a bro-date?”

“I don’t know, but it sounds like something you’d do. Trick or coerce me and Steve to hang out together on some man-event or whatever.”

“Oh please,” she laughed. “When I get you two together it won’t be just the two of you. I’d be there, of course. Otherwise, how could I control the whole thing? And if I’m there, I might as well bring Tony and Bruce along. They get into trouble if they’re left to their own devices.”

***

It turned out, however, that Tony and Bruce didn’t want to come. They’d teamed themselves up together for some robot-building competition and quoted the importance of it in tandem when Natasha tried to coerce them.

“This place is going to have all the latest in mechanical and programming development,” Bruce grinned. “There are going to be some really important people there.”

“Robots!” Tony shouted. “Mother-fucking robot competition. I will destroy them all!”

“They’re not going to fight, Tony,” Bruce reminded him.

“Maybe not with their hands,” Tony quipped, taking a step back too far and accidentally bumping a table, knocking several small bits of machinery onto the floor.

“But with their minds,” he continued, ducking down onto his hands and knees to gather the pieces. “With their minds, they’ll be unstoppable! We’re unstoppable.”

“God, Tony,” Natasha sighed. “You’re in full megalomaniac mode already.” She turned to Bruce and added, “This is the lamest excuse for you to ditch me ever. Also, make sure he doesn’t kill anyone. And, for the love of everything, do _not_ let him attempt AI.”

***

In the end, it might have been for the best that not everyone came along. Sure Steve tried to bail, quoting “third wheel” tropes, but Natasha pretended not to see the texts until she and Clint were outside his house. After that, when he still told them just to go without him, she threatened to sit outside his house and honk the horn until Steve either called the police or came out to join them.

“If he doesn’t want to hang out,” Clint tried, “maybe we shouldn’t make him.” But Natasha just pursed her lips and shook her head.

Clint leaned over to read the latest text message, which was calling Natasha’s bluff on the horn thing.

“Don’t,” Clint warned, much less certain that her threat had actually been a bluff.

“Oh, quit freaking out,” she scoffed, tapping away at her phone. “I’ve got a much better idea.” She put the phone up her to ear and waited as it rang.

Then, “Hey! Sam! Haven’t talked to you in ages.” A pause, and a laugh. “That’s funny. I’m gonna remember that one. Anyway, I’m calling because I’m sitting in my car outside Steve’s apartment, and he’s refusing to come out.” Another pause. “No, he’s refusing to come out in a bad way, trust me to know the difference, please.”

Clint tried to mouth “who is that” but Natasha pinned the phone between her chin and her shoulder and signed _shut up_ , so he rolled his eyes and went back to staring out the car window at Steve’s house. It was small and run down, and definitely not in a classically “safe” neighborhood. It wasn’t as bad as Clint’s own, but it wasn’t a real looker either. Somehow, it didn’t suit the image of Steve that Clint had built up in his head.

He was brought out of his musings by Natasha’s “Thanks, I owe you.”

Then she hung up the phone and looked at Clint, saying, “Sam will take care of it.”

“Why do you feel the need to be a raging force of nature at all times?” Clint sighed. “You can’t take a break, ever? For one day? What if Steve really just wants to stay in and play video games. Or do homework?”

Natasha sighed heavily and then turned to look at Clint with her _I’m being serious now_ face.

“What you need to understand about Steve,” she explained, “is that he has been very alone for a very long time. And sometimes, he goes back to that loneliness, because he doesn’t know where else to go. Because he’s afraid he’ll bring that loneliness with him, and fuck up someone else’s life.”

Clint glanced back at the house and said, “Yeah but his parents have got-“

“Nope,” Natasha cut him off. “There are no parents. They were both killed a couple years back. Steve got himself emancipated right after. He was lucky. They could have put him in a home. He was only sixteen.”

“Holy shit,” Clint breathed.

“I know right,” Natasha said, as her eyes glanced up to the front door of the house. Steve had emerged and was striding angrily toward the car. “You wouldn’t know it to look at him, would you?”

That was all they had time for before Steve flung open the passenger car door and glared in at Clint and Natasha.

“You called Sam?” he spat.

“I did what I had to,” Natasha smiled. “Now jump in the back. Unless you think I need to call him back.”

For a moment, Clint thought Steve was going to reach across him in the passenger seat and throttle Natasha. His fists were clenching and unclenching and his whole body almost vibrated. Clint planned his escape route, ready to jump into the backseat so he could climb out the back and drag at Steve from behind.

But Steve took a deep breath, swiped the hair out of his eyes with one hand, and said, “Goddamn it, Natasha.”

And then, before Clint could quite figure out what was going on, Steve was in the backseat, and they were flying down the highway.

“We better not be going anywhere lame,” Steve pouted.

***

They weren’t going anywhere lame.

Clint had lived in the rolling hills his entire life. He was familiar with the concept of the hidden caves within the rock faces. He and Barney had done their fair share of climbing around in the crevices at the edge of their own backyard, but they’d never been able to make it out to deeper caves outside their walking distance; to the large sprawling Tom-Sawyer-esque darkness that stretched underneath and around the feet of the unknowing passersby.

When Natasha pulled into an underused parking lot - pocketed with gravel and cracking asphalt - Clint felt a flare of apprehensive excitement. He climbed out of the car slowly, ignoring the soft bickering still going on behind him between Natasha and Steve.

The cliff face was sudden. The ground had been rocky but relatively flat, but now he was suddenly staring up at a shadow of the earth that towered above him. Like a challenge, or a whisper.

 _Can you see me, human?_ the wind asked. _I can see you._

“It’s something, isn’t it?” Natasha asked suddenly from behind him, and he startled violently. “Makes you want to do something reckless.”

“Everything makes you want to do something reckless,” Clint said, trying to shake off the ethereal feeling.

“True,” Natasha laughed, then handed him a small package.

“And this is?”

“Hearing aid covers. We’re going dry caving, and it’s gonna be dark as fuck. Don’t need dust getting in and ruining them. You’d never find your way out.”

She said it nonchalantly, but Clint was struck with a sudden image of himself wandering around in the dark, blind and deaf. Unable to see the rock walls, and unable to hear if his cries for help were reaching anyone.

“Um…” he said, but Natasha interrupted him.

“Don’t be stupid. As if I’d lose you. As if I’d let you go.”

“You could have told me we were going caving,” Steve sighed suddenly from beside them. “This shirt is going to be ruined.”

“It’s not going to be ruined,” Natasha scoffed, bending over to tuck her pants into her boots. “It’s just going to be a slightly darker color. Forever.”

“Oh good, that alleviates my fears completely. Thank god my clothes will only be permanently damaged, and not ruined.”

“Fuck you,” Natasha said, without malice, as she walked around to the trunk of her car and opened it to reveal some basic caving equipment.

“You’re all right ruining those clothes, right?” she asked Clint as she handed him a headlamp and a dust mask.

As if he’d ever tell her no. His clothes were shit anyway. Turning them a slightly browner color was more than worth it to wander around in the dark with Natasha. Assuming he didn’t get lost and wander around alone until he starved to death.

***

The cave itself was variable. When they climbed into the opening, the echoes of their footsteps and muffled conversations echoed back to them with the vastness of a lost breath. But eventually they got to what appeared to be a dead end, and the rough rock face scraped along Clint’s fingers and he dragged his hand across.

“Now what?” Steve asked, turning so his light went right in Natasha’s eyes.

“Turn your head, stupid,” she quipped, shoving his chin. “And now we crawl.” She laid down on the floor and her headlamp illuminated an opening near the ground, just large enough for someone to crawl through on their stomach.

Clint moved down onto his stomach immediately, prepared to follow, but Steve said, “Um, Natasha? Does anyone know where we are or something? At least?”

“Don’t be stupid,” she said, already halfway disappeared underneath the rock face. “I know these caves really well.”

“You heard her,” Clint laughed struggling forward on his stomach. He was deep in the throes of some heady headspace that left him vibrating with excitement and desperate for danger. The kind of feeling that makes you do stupid shit like jump of buildings or get in fights you can’t win.

The dust was thicker than he’d expected. He had felt it beneath his shoes as he’d walked, but it was still a shock; deep enough to bury his hands in, and soft like silk. It wasn’t sand, or even dirt, but slippery dust that felt cold to the touch, as though it hadn’t been disturbed in a hundred years.

They didn’t speak much for a while after that. Natasha picked her way along, slowly but with confident purpose. Steve and Clint trailed behind, with Clint in the middle. Clint lost himself in the mindless focus of moving forward over rough terrain, and let his mind wander.

He’d gotten another postcard from Barney, last night. Which was stupid as all get out, because there was no telling when his father would actually get his life together enough to check the mail himself, and if he did it on a day when one of those postcards came, hell would rain down.

Not that he minded getting the postcards. He loved them desperately, the way only someone who is alone can love the glimmer of human contact. So, at the same time, he hated them, because they always said the same thing.

_Sorry. Please call._

And then the phone number. Same phone number, every time, just asking Clint to call.

_Please call._

Scrawled in blue pens, or black pens, or green pens, and one time in what Clint swore was red crayon.

Clint had never called.

How do you justify calling your brother, when he’s running from the law for murder?

How do you justify not calling your brother, when he committed the murder for _you_?

“So Steve,” Clint said suddenly, because anything was better than thinking about that black hole of a situation. “What are your post-high school plans?”

Steve laughed, without much real humor, and said, “College, I supposed.”

“Okay,” Clint pressed. “But is that the real answer, or the answer you give people so they nod and ask a different question?”

“Careful, Clint,” Natasha said from the front. “Caves are like the witching hour. Ask questions like that in a place like this, and you’ll find us all raw and bleeding sooner rather than later. The darkness doesn’t let you keep secrets.”

“I’m asking,” Clint persisted, “because I want to know. Steve. Explain ‘you’ to me. What do you want?”

There was a long silence, and Clint could feel Steve weighing the sincerity of the question. The pros and cons of making or joke and moving on versus really giving away the answer.

“I don’t know,” he finally said. “I don’t really think about it a lot.”

It was probably the most honest thing he could have said in the moment.

“Ok,” Clint grinned. “So, what _do_ you think about?”

Steve sighed heavily. “Look, I’m sure you know I haven’t had the most happy life. I’m definitely sure that Natasha has told you a little bit about it.”

“I would never!” Natasha scoffed, but her subsequent giggle ruined the perfect scorned delivery.

“She said your parents died,” Clint admitted. “What happened?”

“Back-to-back incidents. Like getting struck by lightning twice. Dad was overseas and we got word he’d been killed in action. Then, less than forty-eight hours later, my mom was caught up in a gang fight that happened in the ER. Got shot and bled out. Bled out on the floor of a hospital. I mean, how the fuck do you bleed out on the floor of a hospital? A hospital is _where you go_ when you’re bleeding out!”

He panted for a moment, overcome with the sudden anger, and then laughed sheepishly.

“Sorry. I’ve been having a bad week. The ironic thing is that their life insurance policies really put out. A nurse and a soldier, both killed on duty. I’m set for life. Even got myself declared an independent. So it’s not all bad, I guess. Sorry to word-vomit like that.”

“It’s fine,” Clint said, and Natasha echoed, “It’s more than fine.”

A few more moments of silence and then Natasha said, “Tell him about Bucky, Steve.” She said the name - Bucky - reverently. Like a prayer.

“He doesn’t want to hear about that.”

“I do,” Clint said quickly. He felt nervous at how completely he’d lost control of the conversation, but excited, too. He’d wanted to get to know Natasha’s friends beyond the surface layers it took to hang out at school or the pool. He’d wanted a friend besides his girlfriend. He wanted to know what it felt like to be texting two people at once. Or maybe three people at once, juggling different conversations and never having a moment where he was _really_ alone, because when you’re texting three people at once you can’t keep up, and there’s a constant string of messages for you.

So he said it again.

“I do. I really want to hear.”

“I’m not sure it’s smart…”

“He’s not going to tell,” Natasha spoke again. “And even if he betrayed us like that, he couldn’t prove anything.”

“Steve tell me about Bucky,” Clint insisted, and maybe it was something about the name on Clint’s lips, but Steve broke.

“Bucky was my best friend growing up. He lived with his foster father just down the street from us, and everything was perfect. We slept over, we went to each other’s birthday parties, we mimicked each other’s laughs and words and body language. I don’t even remember who kissed whom first, because everything we did was like this mirror game. One of us moved, and then the other moved. And if that was the end of the story, it would be so goddamn good.”

“What happened?” Clint asked carefully.

“His foster father happened. I guess Buck finally got old enough to be a pain in the ass, or whatever. It was little things, at first. We were out of sync, somehow. Which wasn’t even something I could bring up in conversation, you know? How do you say, ‘you’re not doing and thinking the same things in the same way that I am anymore’ because that’s just creepy, and it doesn’t make any sense.”

Clint understood, though. He knew exactly what Steve meant. It was what it felt like when someone you knew intimately suddenly had a secret they didn’t want you to find out. And just like that, Clint knew the next part of the story.

“He was hitting him,” Clint supplied. “Bucky’s foster father. He was hitting him.”

“See,” Steve spat, suddenly angry. “You got it right off. It took me months. It took me noticing the long sleeves in hot weather. It took me seeing the bruises that came with stories that didn’t quite line up. It took to watching my underage boyfriend sneak around bottles of whiskey without explaining where he got them. In the end, I didn’t get it until he broke up with me.”

“He broke up with you?” Clint echoed.

“Sort of. His dad…it wasn’t just physical abuse. There was some gas-lighting shit going down in that house. Psychological games and psychotic power trips. Making him play fucking games like ‘would you rather’ and making Bucky try to figure out which was the lesser of two evils. Not that I knew it was all happening right away. No, I found out way after the damage was done. Way too late to save anyone.”

“Ok,” Clint said slowly, suddenly very afraid of where the story was going next. “So, where is he now?”

They’d continued walking, and Clint suddenly realized they’d come into some kind of a dead end with a large open space in the middle. Natasha came to a stop, and the two boys behind her followed suit. None of them turned around or moved, preserving the physical structure of the conversation.

“I kidnapped him,” Steve said. “No other word for it really. And trust me, please, when I say that it was a last-ditch effort. I tried every trick I knew, but he was pushing me further and further away. Like, real Stockholm Syndrome shit. The kind of stuff you see in movies. So, I panicked. I got his dad away from the house one night, and then I broke in. Had to use bolt cutters to get into his bedroom, ‘cause he was fucking padlocked in.”

“My god,” Clint breathed. His own home life suddenly seemed so…tame.

“I had to fight him, to get him into the car. Physically fight him. And halfway through, I’m thinking, ‘is this the right thing? Does he even want me to do this?’ and it was the most terrifying moment of my life. And then, suddenly, we were in the car and I was driving, and he was leaned over the consul and crying into my shirt, and he was just talking. Talking, talking, talking, and I suddenly realized he was telling me every horrible thing that man had done to him. A laundry list of sins committed against him. All the way home.”

“What did your parents do when you got there?” Clint asked.

“You’ve got the timeline all wrong,” Steve said bitterly. “They were two months gone by the time this happened. And then, in the morning, so was Bucky.”

“Wait,” Clint interrupted. “He was just gone? What do you mean?”

“He passed out almost as soon as we got in the door, and I curled up around him. I must have fallen asleep, too, because, next thing I knew, I was waking up and he was gone. I thought maybe he’d gone back, but I checked, and he hadn’t.”

“So you have no idea where he is?” Clint confirmed, head spinning.

“He’ll come home to you when he’s ready to,” Natasha intoned quietly, coming up behind Clint to lean her head on his shoulder and peer over it at Steve. The lamps made everything strange, keeping them from really being able to see each other’s faces.

“I’m so sorry,” Clint said, because what else do you say to that?

“Yeah,” Steve said, bending down to pick up a rock off the cave floor. He played with it in his hand as he added, “So am I.”

Then he threw the rock, hard, and the sound of it hitting the ceiling above them echoed through the air. Then Steve picked up another one, and threw it, too.

“It’s all just fucking unfair,” he said, loudly enough to be heard over the reverberations. “Over and over and over.” Another rock, this time thrown with a grunt and a further flight path. “I understand if it has to be unfair _sometimes_ , but why all the time.” Another rock. “Why constantly?” And another.

The clattering noise slowly faded away, as did the echoes of Steve’s rising voice. He stood there, panting and staring at the far wall. His whole body was tensed, and his muscles shook with the exertion of it, willing him to do something, anything, but there was nothing to do.

Suddenly, he turned on his heel and looked right at Clint, shining the headlamp in his eyes for a moment, before he suddenly turned it off, reducing the number of lamps in the cave to two.

Silence. And then, somehow knowing exactly what Steve wanted, Clint turned his off as well. Then Natasha did hers, and they were all three in the darkness. Darkness like you don’t see in houses or farms or mansions. Starless darkness without the slightest glimmer of direction from anywhere. The kind of darkness that can keep a secret.

_Two can keep a secret, if one of them is dead._

All of them were dead here.

“Ask me again, Clint,” Steve said from the darkness. And Clint knew exactly what he meant.

“What do you want, Steve?” he asked softly.

“I want to come home to my parents. I want to open up the screen door and see my mom and my dad. I want to be hungry again, barely scraping by. I want to be unsure about my future, and worried about money, and desperately, _desperately_ , happy.”

“Steve,” Natasha whispered, but Clint reached out in the dark and put a hand on her shoulder, and she fell into silence.

“I want to be able to visit my best friend,” Steve continued, softer now that the anger was leaking out into the insatiable black of the caves. “I want him to never have known what it meant to be scared of his own home, trapped with that man. I want…I want to remember the touch of his hair when I run my fingers through it. I want to remember what kind of shampoo he buys, and I want to fucking wake up next to him, and I want to be able to have him, if I can’t have my parents. And I _can’t_. I can’t have _any_ of it!”

He screamed, then. An open-mouth desperate cry that echoed and echoed and echoed and had to be ripping his throat up raw and he just kept screaming. He screamed his lungs out, his soul out, his grief out, and the darkness ate it all right up.

“Steve!” Natasha called, and the sound abruptly ceased.

A moment later, Steve’s headlamp clicked on, and Clint blinked in the sudden light. He hesitated for a moment, and then followed suit. Natasha did the same.

Steve laughed once, roughly. “What was it you said, Natasha? Ripped open and bleeding, or something like that?”

“I hate being right,” she said, and reached out to take his hand.

Clint saw the moment he could have been jealous at the way her hand curled so familiarly into Steve’s. He saw the moment, and he watched it pass by with joyful self-righteousness, because this moment was too pure for petty shit like division. So he took Steve’s other hand, and they all stood in a line.

The trek out of the cave was a long one, and even longer for the fact that they all refused to let go of each other’s hands. As they moved, it slowly became a game, instead of a lifeline. They struggled and twisted around each other and the rocks and refused to give up.

They almost lost when they had to crawl under the low rock face again, but they managed by having Natasha and Clint crawl a bit and then drag Steve along up with them.

By the time they arrived into the setting sun, they were laughing and covered in dust, and everyone’s clothes were ruined, and it was hard to believe that the scene had just unfolded in real life only a few moments before.

Hard to believe, but not impossible. Clint could still see it in the way Natasha met his eyes just before them climbed into the car, and in the way Steve’s shoulders tensed again when they all had to let go of each other’s hands to get into the vehicle.

It was a subdued car ride home, and the shadows from the mountains chased them all the way.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m back! I bet you thought I’d died or something. Well, you’d be a little right because med school ate me alive for a month or so there. But I got my life back(ish) and just in time for NaNo!
> 
> (“Wait,” you say. “Isn’t that for new works? Isn’t that the NaNoWriMo rule?”)
> 
> YES THAT’S CORRECT I WILL BE STARTING A NEW WORK ON SATURDAY, WELCOME TO HELL
> 
> That's right, the girl who only once put a fic on hiatus now has TWO fics on hiatus for the next month, because I have lost the little control over my life that I had and no one can stop me, because I am very good at pretending I’m an adult and have all my neighbors fooled.
> 
> I’m not sure where I was going with that, but I think it was to inform you that this fic is on hiatus until December.
> 
> ("Lol, whatever. It took you over a month to post this one chapter anyway, I don't know how the hell you think you're going to pull off NaNoWriMo.")
> 
> SHUT UP!


	5. Can You Not Hear Me Or Are You Not Listening?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FINALLY, RIGHT? I bet people thought I'd abandoned this, but I HAVE NOT! Woo hoo! Now that NaNo is (very) over, this is my primary project.
> 
> Also, many thanks to the lovely and patient [hawknat](http://hawknat.tumblr.com/) for her insights into deaf experiences, and for answering the many inane questions I repeatedly sent her way.
> 
> And finally, heads up for ableism. I mean, I know it's a tag up there. But just in case.

Ragnarok. Motherfucking Ragnarok. Clint blinked at the tickets and tried to find something perfect to say.

“These are really good tickets,” he managed, which was probably close. Natasha gave her close-lipped smile, the one full of amusement, and handed him another pair of thin laminated…passes?

“Oh my god,” Clint gaped. “These are backstage passes. These are fucking backstage passes to Ragnarok. How the fuck did you get these?”

“I know a guy,” Natasha laughed. “Actually, I know a couple guys, and a girl. I knew Thor and Loki before they were Thor and Loki. Know the stage manager, too. In fact, Jane and I still snapchat on a consistent basis.”

Clint had to actually sit down.

“This is some straight up Lifetime Movie shit. What the actual hell?”

“So, you’re coming?”

“Uh, no offense, Natasha. But I’m holding back stage passes to Ragnarok. I will not only be coming, I will probably be ignoring you while we’re there.”

“Rude,” Natasha laughed. “But understandable, I guess. In the interest of full disclosure, the passes aren’t technically for the whole band. Most of them have to tap out early because they’re flying out to meet with a lawyer about something. I wasn’t really paying attention.”

“I think I’ll survive,” Clint snorted.

She grinned at his awe for a moment, but then her mouth turned down a little, and she gestured to the tickets the Clint was clutching tightly.

“Honestly, I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t know how to ask. You listen to them all the time, but I didn’t know about a concert.”

“Why the hell wouldn’t I want to go to a concert? I mean, you didn’t give me much warning but, uh hello? I think I’ll live with that.” He looked at her in confusion when she made a face to indicate that he hadn’t quite gotten the point, and he realized what she’d meant.

“Oh,” he said. “Because of the deaf thing.”

“I’m sorry, is that stupid? I don’t know if that’s stupid or not.”

Clint laughed, and kicked her ankle lightly. “It’s not stupid. I don’t mind you asking, but I think I’ll be fine. I mean, I haven’t ever been to a concert before. Or, I haven’t really been around loud noises like that period. Still, I don’t think it’ll be a problem. I can just turn my hearing aids way down if it’s too loud, and if it’s still too bad I can turn them off. Being at a concert is about more than the music. Or so I hear.” He grinned at his own attempt at a pun, and Natasha rolled her eyes,

“You are such a dork,” she scoffed.

“Look who’s talking,” Clint shot back.

***

Clint called her the afternoon of the concert. He pinned the phone between his shoulder and his ear as it rang, wincing and readjusting his grip when it pushed his hearing aid against him weird.

“Oh thank god,” he gasped, when Natasha picked up, then continued quietly. “What do you wear to a concert?”

“Nothing at all,” Natasha answered without a beat of hesitation. “It’s _that_ kind of a concert. Didn’t you know? I’m way into group orgies now. It’s kinda the new ‘in’ thing.”

“I’m sure you think you’re fucking hilarious, but I need help,” he whisper-yelled.

“Why are you whispering?”

“Because my dad is home,” he answered, before he could think it through, and then bit his lip at the potential questions that might open. Fortunately, Natasha gasped in delight.

“You’re sneaking out tonight? Oh my gosh, I love it. When I come by, should I park a ways away? Do we need a signal? I can honk three times while I drive by and then wait at the end of the road.”

“What the fuck, Natasha? I probably won’t hear it.”

“I’m still gonna do it. That’s our signal now. I’ll drive by, honk, and then go three houses down. If you don’t show in five minutes, I’ll just text you. And wear a t-shirt and jeans, Clint. It’s not an orchestral concert.”

She hung up with a click, and Clint would have hurled the phone against the wall in frustration, if his frustration hadn’t been being smothered with feelings of affection.

***

Clint was feeling pretty high on life when they made it to the concert. Everyone was hyped up and chatting about the band while they waited through the line into the venue. The passes were stashed safely in Natasha’s purse for use after the show, since they’d both considered it unwise to wear them during the event.

Clint got his first feeling of unease once they made it into the main room. The chatter of so many people was already reverberating through his hearing aids, making him uncomfortable. He had to turn them down to their lowest setting to even be able to walk around through the room. When the bands actually started playing, it would probably be worse.

He turned to Natasha, gestured to his ears and signed to her that he’d turned them way down, and probably wouldn’t be able to hear her in the engulfing din. She shrugged and signed back “no problem” with a smile.

She was wrong. Big problem. It started the moment the opening band started to play, when the music and screaming began and it all pierced through his head like a fucking ice pick, and he was surprised he had the presence of mind to turn them off, rather than yanking them right out of his head.

For a moment, that was okay. He took a deep breath, reaching out to clutch onto Natasha’s sleeve as the crowd surged around him. She clutched back, and they managed to keep from being torn apart as everything resettled – each holding onto each other’s sleeve.

But then, that wasn’t really fine either. Although Natasha had apparently suspected that Clint might have a problem with the noise, neither of them had anticipated the oppressive nature of _silence_.

Everyone was moving. He could feel the beat underneath his feet and it pulsated through his body, but not his ears. His mind kept telling him that something was supposed to be happening, but there’s wasn’t any sensory input. Just a faint partially-imagined humming noise that might have been the concert and might have been a constant noise in his head that he just hadn’t paid attention too before.

Natasha was having a good time, though. She was already jumping, along with a fair number of other people, even though it was just the opening band. They must be pretty good. Or maybe they were someone important. Clint hadn’t thought to ask, and it was too late now.

Natasha turned to grin at him, face distorting in the lights flashing to a rhythm he couldn’t quite seem to follow, regardless of its insistent presence rolling up his feet. He grinned back though, because her face was covered in a thin sheen of sweat and some of her hair had fallen out of her hair tie and was layering itself in long sticky curls along her face and she was just so recklessly abandoned that he couldn’t help it.

He even made an effort to jump along with her, but gave it up soon enough. Fortunately, so did the rest of the group, as the excitement of the first song began to wear off, and people settled in for the long haul.

He kept thinking that it would get better. He kept expecting his brain to realize that things were just weird and it needed to get with the program and chill. But the rhythm was changing, and the air was cloying, and Clint’s mouth suddenly felt dry, and he couldn’t even take a breath.

He resolved himself to hang on at least till Ragnarok came on. He counted his breaths and stood still in the middle of the pulsating crowd and tried to figure out what shoes people were wearing, and that seemed to help a little but not enough.

Enough would have been being able to fucking hear. Enough would have been not having to worry about the bass and the screaming and the high pitched whining noise. Enough would have been not feeling his fingers twitching where they touched Nat’s sleeve. Enough would have been excited and happy instead of anxious and self-flagellating.

He didn’t ask for this. This wasn’t fair. He couldn’t even go to a concert with his girlfriend, so what the hell was the point of him?

He didn’t notice that he was bent over and hyperventilating into the floor until Natasha had one arm around his back and the other firmly holding his upper arm. She pulled him partially upright and shoved the both of them through all the way to the back and out the door into the cooling evening air. When one of the staff gave them an odd look, she flipped him off and kept walking.

They walked along the street and toward the parking garage, and Clint was suddenly irrationally afraid that she was going to pack him into the car and drive them both home. Or worse, that she’d dump him in the car to wait while she went back to enjoy herself.

“Sorry!” he said, and then winced at the realized that it had probably come out way too loud.

 _What do you need_ , she signed at him.

Clint shook his head once and then turned back on his hearing aids. Suddenly, he could hear the rush of the cars on the street as they flew past. The weirdness of the wind between the buildings. The heavy breathing of both him and Natasha as they tried to understand what had just occurred. It was, unexpectedly, calming to be able to hear and see the same things. Strange. The silence hadn’t ever bother him before. Maybe he was just over-sensitized by the settling chaos.

“I’m fine,” he lied.

“Bullshit. What happened?”

He shrugged, unsure how to properly explain. Eventually he just went with, “I don’t know, but I’m not going to be able to handle it in there.”

“There’s a really great Thai place down the block. Feel like getting some dinner while we wait for the concert to end?”

“Don’t be stupid. Go back and have fun. I’ll find a way to entertain myself.”

“ _You_ don’t be stupid. I didn’t come out here to see a band play. I came to hang out with my boyfriend. I came to introduce him to my friends. We’ll just head back once it’s ending and go straight backstage. No big deal.”

He wanted to cry. Instead, he covered it up with questions.

“So,” he asked, “how did you meet them anyway? Thor and his brother?”

Natasha snorted. “Don’t let Loki hear you talking like that. He’s kind of an ass, honestly. Oh wow. ‘Thor and his brother.’ I can just imagine his face. I don’t think he’ll ever get over that Thor’s lead singer, even if he’s just fine on lead guitar. It’s not like he doesn’t have his share of fangirls and fanboys.”

“Noted,” Clint responded. “So? You going to tell me how you guys met, or not?”

“Texas,” she answered, taking him by the hand and beginning to walk them down the street. “Our parents were both stationed at Ft. Sam Houston. Their dad is actually a pretty big deal. Three-star general and all that jazz. Like big money. Way bigger than my dad. Actually, when he found out that we were hanging out, he was thrilled. Almost ruined our whole friendship.”

“Because your dad was happy?”

“You might have noticed, but I tend to go out of my way to make sure to make my dad unhappy.”

That explained him at least.

“So?” he pressed. “What happened next?”

“Well, this was about four years ago, and his band was pretty much him the two of them, messing around. First in garages and then in rentable recording studios. And then suddenly, there was Jane.”

“Jane?”

“Thor’s fiancé. That woman is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Sixth months after she and Thor started dating, she became stage manager and managed to find them the rest of the band. Suddenly they were having regular practice, playing in coffee shops and clubs and actually getting paid. It was kind of weird, honestly. One minute they’re my goofy friends in a garage band, and the next they’re openers on a tour of the country. It wasn’t much more time between that and their surge to stardom.”

“Wait,” Clint gasped, grabbing her sleeve. “That means you know their real names! You know at least a few real names!”

Natasha grinned widely while she used his grip on her sleeve to pull him into the Thai restaurant she’d been walking them toward. Clint managed to keep quiet while they were being seated, but turned right back to her the moment the waitress walked away, after leaving waters for them on the table.

“Ok spill,” he insisted. “You’ve got to tell me. No one knows their real names, you’ve got to tell me.”

“First of all, I only knew Thor and Loki from before. Sif, Fandral, Hogun, and Volstagg all joined later. I probably knew their names at one point, but I’ve forgotten by now. I’ve called them by their stage names for too many years. So I’m not going to slip up now. It’s not going to happen, Barton. I took an oath. A blood oath.”

“There has got to be something that will make you tell!”

“Sorry,” she laughed. “The deal was that I could only ever spill the secret on my wedding night. So I guess you’ve got a long time to wait.”

That threw him for a loop. A multitude of possible responses filtered through his head, ranging from smooth to horrifyingly awkward. What came out of his mouth, however, was, “Oh yeah, I bet your dad would _love_ that. He’s a big fan of the poor and the downtrodden.”

He’d said it with a better twist to his mouth that was just a little too obvious, and he cursed himself for that. It was one thing for people to insult their own parents, but it was a whole new huge step for boyfriends to be the ones doing the insulting.

His anxiety didn’t settle when he glanced over and saw her staring down at her water, fingers dragging through the condensation that was dripping down to leave a ring on the table. Her mischievous smile had vanished and she appeared to be looking a thousand miles away. Her lips weren’t pursed in anger, but there was a unexpected tiredness to the look. She wasn’t even blinking.

Clint opened his mouth to apologize – god he’d stepped over so many lines with just a few sentences – but she spoke before he could get out a word.

“What did you say to my father?”

“What?” he stammered. “When?” Which was a stupid question, really. He’d had all of one conversation with her father. That disastrous day when he’d found them in bed together, each warding the other again the cold.

“You know when,” Natasha sighed. “What did you say? I was braced for the worst, you know. I thought he was going to come back up and yell at me and say all kinds of hurtful things. I had all kinds of hurtful things prepared, in kind. It’s, like, our thing. But he didn’t come back up. In fact, I didn’t see him until I finally walked down the stairs to leave for school. I walked past him, and he was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee. He waved at me. He told me to have a good day.”

“Weird,” Clint commented.

“Really fucking weird,” she said, turning to look at him. “Seriously. What did you say?”

“I told him the truth.”

“And that was?”

Clint shrugged, and then gave her a half-grin, saying, “I’ll tell you when you tell me the real names of the Ragnarok members.”

“Guess I’ll have to hang on till the wedding night,” she sighed, and raised her glass of water to her mouth to sip at it. Clint couldn’t help but snort at the ridiculousness of the possibility. He couldn’t even imagine something so seeped in fantasy.

As his sound of derision, she glanced up at him from over her glass and narrowed her eyes slightly, but Clint kept his eyes on the table and pretended he didn’t notice. Eventually, she put the glass down and declined to comment further. Besides, a waitress showed up for their orders and, by the time she left, the conversational tide had shifted.

***

They ate slowly, talking about school and TV shows and how strange it was to look up at the stars and realize how little of existence you’ll actually ever see. Natasha seemed to have a great handle on the way concert timing worked, because they meandered their way back down the street – stopping at a hole-in-the-wall jewelry shop to “ooo and aah” at the pretty but overpriced rocks – and they arrived back just as the early-leavers were trickling out.

“Ready?” Natasha asked, reaching out to slip the pass over his head. It hung around his neck perfectly, and he clutched at it with one hand and at Natasha’s sleeve with the other.

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” he said.

How had he come to this? He missed most of the journey through the quieting and emptying venue over toward the stage. He did notice the staff checking their passes and waving them through, pointing and smiling while Natasha smiled back and made quick small talk. Mostly, however, he was just staring in awe.

A few months ago he had been the loser with his own table. Not even part of the loser group. Just alone. Alone, and angry, and scared, and without the slightest possibility of change on the horizon. And then Natasha had literally come around the corner into his life, bathing their meeting in blood like a baptism, or a sacrifice.

He was about to meet Thor. Thor and Loki, and Jane, apparently. He should have been star-struck with the very idea of it. But when they pushed their way through the door – when he could have been getting his first glimpse of the fastest-rising band on this continent – he was just staring at Natasha.

Her face lit up in easy joy at what she saw, and that’s what turned his head in the end. Thor was already standing up, arms wide as Natasha ran across the room and leapt into his arms for a hug. And she really leapt, too. Online pictures and aired interviews didn’t really do the man justice. He had to be at least a foot taller than Natasha. And gods. Did arms muscles really get that big? Was that a real thing?

Heart-rate picking up, Clint let his gaze dart all over the room. Loki was sitting on the couch, showing no intention of standing, while he hunched over his guitar and plucked at the strings idly. A woman with brown hair and incredibly vibrant eyes walked into the room, her face lighting up with a smile, and Clint assumed that had to be Jane.

“Natasha!” the woman greeted, and Nat finally struggled free of Thor’s embrace, eagerly skipping across the room the embrace the other woman. When they’d finished, Natasha kept her arm around Jane’s shoulder and turned to gesture to Clint.

“Everyone, this is Clint. AKA ‘The Boyfriend.’ ”

“ ‘lo,” Clint managed, sticking one hand deep in his pocket and waving the other half-heartedly. Because, I mean, mother-fucking-Thor.

“You finally managed to end up with a boyfriend,” Loki drawled from the couch. “And this is the end result? I guess I was expecting something a little more impressive, with how long it took.”

Clint felt his heart stutter for a moment, and then plunge upward into his mouth when Natasha took a quick step to the side and smacked Loki upside the head. Like, really fucking hard.

“Eat a bag of dicks,” she purred, bending over the back of the couch to get in his face.

And Clint swore he saw Loki’s lips twitch in a smile when he responded, “It’s been too long, Natasha.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she scoffed. “Now play nice, because if you don’t then I won’t either.”

Loki sighed heavily and glanced up at Clint and nodded once in greeting, returning quickly to his guitar.

“That’s the best you can expect out of him,” Thor said, stepping forward to shake Clint’s hand. Which was kind of an event of its own. Honestly, Clint felt like he had some kind of whiplash, and he just kept glancing around the room aimlessly.

“Seriously,” Jane said, coming up behind Thor. “Ignore Loki. He enjoys being a prick because it makes him the center of attention. We’re having sushi brought up to our hotel. You guys in to head over and join us?”

“Clint?” Natasha asked. “You in?”

Clint blinked once, glancing around from person to person, all eyes on him. (Well, most eyes. Loki was still plucking away.)

“Am I in?” he gaped. “Of course I’m fucking in.”

The fact that he thought sushi was disgusting was wholly irrelevant. Besides, they’d just eaten Thai anyway.

***

It didn’t turn out to be that bad. There were a few that didn’t have fish, and a few with cooked meat, so Clint picked his way around. Besides, the whole experience was a literal heaven. Clint sat in silent rapt attention, watching the banter rage among the friends. Loki, it appeared, really was an ass to everyone, so there was at least that. Thor was great, constantly turning back to Clint and really paying attention when he spoke. And Jane was hilarious. She was a little like Natasha, and Clint could totally imagine them as friends in junior high, running around military bases and breaking as many rules as would bend beneath their weight.

At one point, everyone joined in with Clint and Nat in sign language, attempting the hand movements and being quick to mock everyone else when they got it wrong. Jane paid the closest attention and seemed to exert the most effort, while Thor got all the points for enthusiasm. He asked for the signs for so many words that there was no way he’d remembered even 10% of them.

Loki was the biggest surprise on that one though, ignoring the event from where he was reading on the couch until Thor challenged him enough times that he sat up with a heavy sigh, and promptly informed everyone that he wasn’t interested in playing. In flawless sign language.

Well, almost flawless.

In a burst of unusual courage, probably from the weird endorphins flooding his system, Clint raised an eyebrow and signed at Loki, _Your empty face makes everything useless. Dead people have more expression than you._

Natasha gasped and then laughed loudly in delight while Clint had about four seconds to question his decision to mock someone like Loki before a weird smile twisted the man’s face. He didn’t respond directly though, and when Thor expressed his surprise at Loki knowing any sign language, he just shrugged and returned to his book.

***

“What did you think?” Natasha asked, as they climbed back into the car, in the early morning hours. Clint thought about the rising sun outside and wondered what members of his family, if any, had noticed that he hadn’t been home all night. The band members had had an morning flight to get to, but they’d milked out every spare second they could.

“Hey!” Natasha called at him, waving her hand in front of his face, then when he glanced at her, she signed, _Did you turn your hearing aids off?_

“No,” he laughed. “Just lost in thought. And, to answer your question, it was great. Really fantastic. I’m a little star-struck, but honestly Thor is really great. Friendly and honest, and I bet he notices a lot more that’s happening than he lets on.”

“Usually,” Natasha laughed, starting the car and pulling it into reverse. She twisted her head to look over her shoulder, and pulled them out of the parking space. The entire garage was mostly empty, and there certainly weren’t a lot of cars moving around. In fact, the dark echoing space was eerily quiet.

“Not always?” Clint asked.

“He’s a really good guy. Like, honestly a really good guy. Sometimes that means he doesn’t notice really well when other people aren’t. But I don’t worry about him too much anymore. He’s got Jane. And, oddly, Loki. They’re at each other’s throats ten times out of ten, but it’s a very ‘only I’m allowed to make you miserable’ kind of a relationship.”

“I’m familiar with that kind of a concept,” Clint said. They’d pulled out of the parking garage, and he’d been right. The sun was rising. He blinked into it, while Natasha reached into the center consul and slipped on her sunglasses, one-handed.

“Yeah?” she asked. And that kind of a one word response could have been an arbitrary attempt to respond without actually saying anything, but the tone with which Natasha spoke it meant “go on” and “I’m listening.”

“Nah, it’s just, my own brother and I had a similar relationship. Very “I’m gonna kill you” right up until the moment that someone else tried to hurt the other. Then, we were suddenly a team.”

A long pause.

“I didn’t know you had a brother,” Natasha said. But...something was off about it. Something about her tone sent a thrill of confusion through Clint, and he tried to identify it.

Maybe he hadn’t heard anything. Maybe he just wasn’t adjusted properly after the concert.

“I don’t,” he said, trying to push the feeling aside. “Not like…I’m sure he’s out there somewhere.” He waved his hand out at the landscape speeding by too quickly. Natasha always drove too quickly, and she never got pulled over.

“So? If he’s not dead, and he’s not your brother, what is he?”

Clint was going to answer. It hung on the tip of his tongue. However, the way she’d said it, mixed with the growing feeling pushing at his mind, suddenly gave him an epiphany. He was suddenly thrown back through all the different hints that Natasha had dropped throughout their relationship. All the different times they’d almost-talked about why Natasha had finally approached him in that school hallway. All the half-conversations and almost-were thoughts.

“You knew already,” he said. And he spoke it with utter conviction. If asked later, he couldn’t have told anyone why, but he was absolutely certain. Some kind of subconscious logician in him had just been working on the problem for too long. He’d wondered “why me?” for too much time, letting it churn in his mind, and suddenly he had part of the answer.

He watched Natasha, while she stared straight ahead at the road, unconsciously pushing down harder on the gas pedal. Or maybe consciously. Maybe trying to avoid the moment altogether, even though it had been her own fault it was occurring.

“Are you mad?” she asked quietly.

“About what? That you know about Barney and the man he shot in the head? About the fact that you apparently went glory-seeking or whatever the fuck it is you call it when people crane their necks to see horrifying car accidents? Is this why the trailer-trash that I am was good enough for you? Because I came with an exciting history. Poor Natasha Romanoff couldn’t get off with normal people anymore. Not after growing up with army boys and rock stars. She had to find something to up the game.”

He was surprised with how angry he was, and even more surprised that she was just taking it. Natasha wasn’t the type to sit in white-knuckled silence under this kind of an onslaught. She fought back with far more bitter venom. Yet, there she sat. Eyes focused straight ahead on the road while she refused to even acknowledge the fact that she was being spoken to.

“Say something,” Clint ordered. He didn’t even yell it. He ordered.

“I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m sorry? That I don’t think you’re being fair? That you’re wrong and I had no idea?”

“I want you to tell me the truth. Why did you seek me out? I’ve almost asked a thousand times, and you’ve almost answered even more, but I’m done letting us skip around this. Why me?”

“My mother is missing.”

That hadn’t been what he was expecting. He wasn’t sure _what_ he’d been expecting, but that hadn’t been it. He didn’t say anything, though, letting the silence force Natasha to continue. Eventually she sighed heavily and did so.

“Look. I know you’re pissed, and I probably should have given in and told you forever ago, but I’m a pretty private person.”

“Whereas I, apparently, am a flashy newspaper heading, for all the world to read through.”

“Stop it. I knew because I heard your name come up. Someone at the army base talking about gun control or whatever. I can’t even remember who it was. They mentioned that your brother had murdered that man and disappeared and no one knew why. It must have been one hell of a summer for you.”

“Tell me about it. So what does that have to do with your mother?”

“I spent a lot of the summer in France with my grandparents on my father’s side. I don’t tend to keep in touch with family life back here when I do things like that. Turns out, maybe I should have. I came home to no mother. She was just…gone.”

“I’m not following.”

“Neither was I!” Natasha shouted, and for the first time some of the emotion she must have been feeling filtered through into her voice and her body. As she cried out, she jerked the steering wheel involuntarily and they swerved slightly to the side before she corrected quickly.

She took a deep breath and continued, “Her things were just gone. Her car and clothes and everything. I finally asked my father, who I had to call because he’d sent a car to pick me up from the airport so he could stay at work. He said she’d left. Just that she’d left. Nothing else. He wouldn’t give me anything else. It took me days to finally piece everything together.”

In spite of himself, Clint was paying attention. He’d intended to be angry at her, overwhelming angry, for a long time. But the fury was already fading away in the wake of the speeding car and the increasingly disturbing story.

“So?” he prompted. “Where was she?”

“Just like my dad said,” Natasha spat, with a twist to her lips. “Gone. He’d kicked her out. Just like that. He pressured or tricked her into signing divorce papers and shipped her off with some money and a ‘new chance at life’ even though she’d made him her whole world for more than a decade.”

“Why?”

“I have my suspicions. She wasn’t…well. Mentally, I think. I guess that just was too much responsibility for my dad.”

“Asshole.”

“You’re telling me.”

They drove in silence for a while, until Clint finally asked, “So what does that have to do with me?” He’d let his tone stray into a more gentle intonation and she seemed to relax a little at it.

“You knew,” she said simply. “You knew what it was like to come home and find someone missing. Someone who was supposed to be in your house, and then suddenly wasn’t. You knew what it was like to go through hell over the summer, and you were still functioning. You were still getting up and showering and going to class and not failing, while I was quite suddenly about to miss all of those things. I felt it coming. Some kind of impending disaster that left me nothing but a chasm in place of my future. I had to talk to you. You clearly knew or understood something that I didn’t. I needed you to teach more and help me and guide me.”

She stopped, chest heaving, exhausted by her sudden pressured speech and unable to breath.

Clint couldn’t even think, much less breath. The very idea that someone would think that he even remotely had his life together after the events of the summer was horrifying to him. Like he’d lied or something. He hadn’t been functioning. He’d been on the most basic autopilot that existed. He didn’t even remember doing things like shower and go to school. He certainly hadn’t been studying. He definitely hadn’t been passing. Not until Natasha.

“I’m not…” he tried. But there wasn’t anything to say, and he let the wind whipping by outside wipe away the words.


	6. Red Sky in the Morning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had to up the number of chapters to eight. I just couldn't fit everything into that space. :)
> 
> TW: some non-graphic but still blatant discussions and descriptions of physical abuse of a child by a father and by another male figure of authority.

They ended up parking a little ways down from Clint’s house, like when she’d picked him up in the first place. They hadn’t spoken for the last several miles of the trip. All the way since Clint hadn’t been able to find the words to speak to Natasha.

But he’d been thinking about them. He’d been thinking about what secrets cost, and all the ways keeping them continuously came back to bite him in the ass. So, when Natasha turned the car off after pulling up to the curb, he spoke without preamble.

“My dad beats me.”

There was about four seconds of silence while they both tried to digest what had just happened, and then Natasha swore. Loudly. Screamed, really. A single-syllabled “Fuck!” that rang out like a gunshot.

She made a move like she was about to get out of the car – to go in and violently confront his father for all he knew – but he stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.

“Just listen, Natasha,” he said calmly. “I didn’t tell you that to rile you up or to try and get you to ‘save me’ or whatever you think you’re about to do right now. I told you that because you told me something, too. Because that’s a secret that I don’t want in my life. I’m getting really tired of keeping secrets. They kind of suck.”

“Clint,” Natasha began, but Clint cut her off.

“I said to just listen, Nat. Now, this is a part of my life, and it has been a part of my life for a very long time. Which is why I didn’t really notice that it was odd when my coach starting acting the same way. I used to take archery lessons, and I really liked them. But my coach? I didn’t like him so much, and he definitely didn’t like me. Or maybe he did, and he was just an asshole. I don’t know. The point is that, with my dad knocking me around for so many years, I didn’t really think it was strange when my coach started doing it.”

“Oh god,” Natasha breathed.

“Yeah well, I said that _I_ didn’t think it was weird. Barney sure as fuck did. Because one day, Mr. Duquesne knocked me to the ground and then kicked me. Which wasn’t anything he hadn’t done before, but this time it broke a rib. And when Barney he found out, he knew it wasn’t one dad had done, and he made me tell him everything.”

“Good,” Natasha spat.

“Good?” Clint repeated, incredulous. “Did you forget how this story ends? It ends with Barney shooting a man in the head.”

He watched her as she came to understand the situation, suddenly realizing where this was leading.

“He shot him,” she said softly. “ _That’s_ the man that he shot. It was your coach.”

“Yeah,” Clint sighed, leaning back against the seat. “Transference or some shit. Taken too many hits from dad. Watched both me and mom take them, too. It was like, he just couldn’t take it from one more person. Shot him right in the head. And I’ll tell you what that gossip on that base didn’t tell you. I was there. I saw it happen.”

Natasha reached out to touch his hand, on some kind of reflex that she had no desire to stop. Clint didn’t want to stop it either. He turned his hand so that, instead of her fingers resting lightly on top on his hand, they were intertwined with his own.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

“I don’t remember a lot of it. It was a normal lesson. I did something wrong. Or maybe I didn’t even do something wrong, and he was just in a bad mood. Either way, he hit me across the face hard, and I hit the ground. It tasted like blood, and I curled up in a little ball. Even when I heard Barney’s voice, I didn’t really register it. Barney always used to step in when he could. I didn’t think about the fact that he shouldn’t have been there. I still don’t know where he came from or how he got there.”

Natasha was silent, letting him tell the story and keeping her face remarkably blank.

“Anyway,” Clint continued. “Eventually something must have broken through. I think it was the fear in Mr. Duquesne’s voice, because dad definitely never sounds afraid. I looked up, and Barney’s holding a gun right at this guy’s head. I didn’t even have time to blink before he pulled the trigger.”

“God, Clint. I’m so sorry.”

“Do you know what a gunshot sounds like through hearing aids? It hurts like fuck. I don’t even know where he got the gun,” Clint said, noticing how tightly he was holding onto Natasha’s hand. She didn’t seem to mind, and he wasn’t going to be stopping any time soon.

“I’m sorry that had to happen to you,” Natasha said. “And I’m sorry that you haven’t had anyone to talk to about it. I’m betting your family isn’t big on therapists.”

Clint could have been offended by that, but instead he just laughed bitterly. She was right after all. He didn’t have to try very hard to imagine the anger in his father’s face if he ever asked to go to a therapist. Hell, he could even imagine the thrill of fear in his mother’s eyes, standing somewhere behind his father. Probably in a doorway that she could disappear around in a split-second.

“Yeah no, there hasn’t really been anyone to talk to. I mean, I maybe could have brought it up with you sooner, but I guess I was scared of getting arrested or something. The hunt for Barney is still going pretty strong. I bet they’d love to cool down public opinion with a scapegoat.”

“Why didn’t you get arrested?” she asked, and then seemed to realize what she’d said, and added, “I’m sorry. I just meant, if you were there, then why weren’t you involved with the investigation?”

“Barney made me go. Told me to run and hide, and that’s what I did. That’s what I always did. He always told me to run and hide, and I always did. I used to cover my ears. I wouldn’t cry though. Crying means you get found.”

“Do you know where he is?” Natasha asked, and then shook her head. “Sorry, again. I keep asking stupid questions, don’t I? You don’t have to tell me that. You don’t have to tell me everything. Keep the secrets that you need to keep.”

“I told you, I’m trying this new thing called ‘not keeping secrets,’ and we’re gonna see where it leads. It certainly can’t be any worse than the whole ‘secret keeping’ way of doing things. And no, to answer you question. I don’t know. But I get postcards every now and then with a burner cell number written on the back. No return address or name, but they’re from Barney. I know.”

“You’ve never called him?”

“And say what? Thanks for shooting someone while I watched and screamed for you not to. Thanks for leaving me alone here. Thanks for abandoning mom and me and everything. Thanks for being such a great example.”

“He was trying to protect you. I mean,” she put her hands up in defense against the look that Clint shot her. “He did a crappy job, I’m not arguing that, I guess. But he did it for you. He tried. Is that not something that you can use to at least a little bit forgive him?”

“He shot the wrong man,” Clint spat. “If he was going to shoot someone, it should have been our dad. How could he do that? How could he get _that_ close, and not do what really needed to be done. He suffered the consequences anyway! He could have just shot the right guy and everything would be the same for him and a thousand times better for us!”

He hadn’t realized he was screaming so loudly, until he felt Natasha flinch in his grip. He forced his body to relax quickly, and murmured a low apology under his breath.

“It’s fine,” Natasha said quickly. “I get your point. I definitely get why you're mad. It’s your family, it’s your call. Literally, I guess. If you don’t want to talk to him, then don’t call. I won’t judge. Sorry I butted in with my opinion.”

“No, it’s fine,” Clint placated. “Sorry I got so mad.”

They sat in silence for a while, and Clint relaxed his grip on Natasha hand, until he could extract his fingers and draw slow circles along her palm and up her arm while they sat. In the dark of the car, he could see that she was watching his fingers move, flexing and extending themselves into patterns of sensation against her skin.

“Guess we both have pretty shitty fathers,” he said suddenly, and he kind of laughed when he said it. “Maybe our meeting was inevitable. Birds of a feather flock together, and all that. I’m sorry about your mom too, by the way. I don’t want that to get lost in how angry I was or in my own story.”

“I’m getting through it. Not as well as you, but I’m getting through it.”

“I wish you’d stop saying that,” Clint sighed. “I’m not doing well, on this whole ‘getting through it’ thing. I’m barely hanging on.”

“Don’t confuse ‘not doing as well as you’d like’ with ‘not doing well at all’. You aren’t failing just because you wish you were better.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Clint responded, though he couldn’t really see himself believing that. “Anyway, I guess I’d better go. I’ve already pushed it with this whole staying out all night thing. I’d definitely better be back before people start waking up. I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”

“Sure, yeah,” Natasha said quickly, moving her hand back to the steering wheel. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Get some sleep today.”

“Yeah.”

***

Clint stood at his front door for a while, squinting back down into the dark to try and see Natasha’s car. He hadn’t seen any lights turn on, so he was fairly sure she was still there, and it was only after a moment of standing still that he realized she was waiting on him. She was sitting there and watching him stand under the porch light so that she could make sure that he got inside safely.

It was, for the briefest moment, the funniest thing in the world. As though his house was safer than the slowly receding darkness outside. Then the moment passed, and he turned the doorknob, stepping inside so that Natasha could drive away and go home.

The lights were on. He processed that fact slowly as he closed the door behind him, and then his father stood up from the couch and Clint wished he’d left it opened. Wished he could dart back outside and sprint down the street screaming. Natasha would probably hear him. She’d come back. She’d do something. She’d do something that actually helped. She’d….

She’d get involved in something messy and disturbing. He couldn’t do that to her. With a quick swallow, he pulled the door shut more firmly behind him and said, “Morning, sir.”

“ _Morning, sir,_ ” his father mocked. “Yeah, it certainly is. You want to tell me where you were during the _night_ bit?”

“Will it matter?” Clint said, softly enough that he couldn’t even feel the vibrations in his throat. Not, however, quietly enough that his father couldn’t hear him. Harold stepped forward quickly enough that Clint barely had enough time to step back and feel the solid door behind him, because thick fingers wrapped in his t-shirt, pulling him up onto his tip-toes.

“Harold,” said a soft voice, and Clint glanced back to see his mother standing in the doorway to the back hall. Sporting the beginnings of a black eye, too, if Clint was seeing properly.

His father also turned around to look at her, probably to yell something about staying out of it. Clint didn’t know, because he took the opportunity to yank his hearing aids out and shove them deep into his pockets.

At least now, he wouldn’t have to hear it. Sometimes, hearing was the worst part.

***

Clint winced slightly when Steve clapped him on the back after school, but he managed to hide most of the pain. Sometimes, ibuprofen worked wonders.

He was standing on the front steps of the building with Natasha, talking about something inane, when Steve manifested, grinning wildly and practically bouncing up and down.

“Guess who’s in town for the afternoon!” he crowed, slinging his arms around both Natasha and Clint.

“Oh my god, why are you so fucking heavy,” Natasha complained.

“Who?” Clint asked obligingly, ignoring the pain in his shoulder.

“Sam!” Steve announced. “I already snagged Tony and Bruce, so you don’t get to say no. He’s only here for a few hours, because he just dropped by to pick up something for a school project, so he has to get back in time for classes tomorrow. But he’s totally ours for the next several hours. We’re getting pizza! You’re driving, Nat.”

Clint raised his eyebrows in amusement at Natasha and she laughed.

“Sam was part of our gang last year,” she explained. “But he was a year older, so he’s at college now. Comes back every now and then, to hang with us lesser folks. You’ll like him.”

“If you like him, then I probably will,” Clint agreed. And he meant it, too. If there was one thing he was learning about Natasha, it was that she chose her friends with extraordinary care.

***

They were right, too. He liked Sam. He was the kind of person that would be difficult not to like. The kind of person who noticed if you spoke and no one else was paying attention so he would redirect his entire attention to you in order to hear what you were trying to say. And he did it with perfect sincerity.

Sam had met them at the restaurant, while Steve had caught a ride with Natasha and Clint. Which would have been fine, since Tony and Bruce each had their own cars. However, Tony had insisted on ‘joining in the road trip,’ even though it was all of four miles, and made Bruce pile into the back with him and Steve.

“Why does Clint get shotgun?” Tony had whined.

“Because he makes out with me,” Natasha answered. “Them’s the rules.”

“I’d make out with you!” Tony announced. “No problem!”

“She bites,” Clint commented, and Steve snorted with laughter.

“Yeah, you know what, nevermind.”

They all made it in one piece though, piling out into the restaurant parking lot like a clown car show. Sam had waved in greeting and Sam and Steve had met in a rough hug that ended with Steve lifting Sam off the ground while Sam protested indignantly.

Before Clint knew it, they were shoved into a booth together, one that had probably been meant for four rather than six.

“So,” Sam said to Clint. “How’d you get roped into this disaster of a gang?”

“Natasha nearly beat a guy to death in front of me,” Clint said, deadpan. “I had to join, or else face elimination as a living witness.”

Natasha snorted, when Sam glanced at her.

“Is that for real?” he asked, looking around and finally settling on Steve. “Not the witness part, but the beating part. Is that real?”

“Sort of,” Steve said, but Tony interrupted loudly.

“Of course it’s real. Nothing less than near-death-experiences from our little red-head. Grant and Brock were limping around for days. It was fantastic.”

“Grant and Brock?” Sam echoed, raising an eyebrow at Natasha. “What got you involved in an argument with those two jerks?” Then he shot a sideways look at Steve and added, “No offense, I guess. I know that you and Brock--”

“Haven’t been speaking lately,” Steve interrupted. “I’ll tell you about it later.”

“Sure, yeah,” Sam said, and then turned back to Tony and Bruce. “I hear you two won a robot contest.”

“It was fun,” Bruce smiled. “Even with this one over here being an ass about everything. I swear, either you can’t get him to focus on work worth a damn, or he’s so focused that he forgets to eat. It’s one or the other, every day.”

“We won another scholarship,” Tony grinned. “I’m starting to lose track of them all, at this point.”

“Tell me you turned it down, at least,” Natasha sighed. “Someone should be benefitting from those.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Tony said, waving his hand at her dismissively. “They gave it to the guys that won second. No problem. Besides, I don’t know if our receiving of it was entirely ethical, seeing as I pretty much slept with one of the judges.”

Steve choked on his soda, coughing as he shouted, “Tony!”

“He’s lying,” Bruce snorted.

“I am not!”

“Then he’s exaggerating. He barely even flirted with her. She shut him down so fast.”

“She did not ‘shut me down.’ She just got busy with her whole judging thing.”

“Shut you down.”

“Lies!”

Sam sighed heavily and turned back to the currently quieter part of the group.

“Sorry I asked,” he grinned, and Clint grinned back automatically. He’d heard the term infectious smile before, but he hadn’t really understood the phrase until meeting Sam.

***

Clint was actually sorry to say goodbye to the guy. They hadn’t had a lot of time in the pizza parlor, but Sam was a blast, and Clint wished he’d had a chance to get to know him before the group had split for college.

College.

That thought sent a sudden flare of fear through him. He’d been trying to avoid thinking about the approaching end of the year, as they were already only a few weeks away from winter break. And now, he was suddenly being faced with the separation of college. Natasha had probably already finished all her college applications. Clint hadn’t even picked one up.

He was forced out of that line of thought by Tony physically catching him by the back of his collar and yanking him away from the front passenger side. He had to twist his legs to get his balance back, and the sudden movement sent a rush of pain down his side. His chest hurt, too, from the weight of his swinging arms.

“Shit,” Clint breathed through his teeth, trying to get rid of the pain. He hadn’t thought about it much while eating. The fuck-ton of ibuprofen he’d popped had been working fine, and he hadn’t minded the pain so much when it came from laughing.

Tony didn’t seem to notice when he’d done, but Bruce did. He laid a gentle hand on Clint’s shoulder and asked quietly, “Hey. You okay?”

“Fine,” Clint panted. “Just got the wind knocked out of me there.”

“Wait,” Tony called from the half-open passenger door. “Did I actually hurt you?”

“No,” Clint lied. “I’m totally fine.”

Natasha was standing on the other side of the car, looking over it to where Bruce and Clint were standing. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion as she considered what was happening. Clint tried to wave at her and grin, but he was having more trouble getting his breath back than he’d anticipated. The ibuprofen must have worn off.

“Clint,” Bruce said quietly, bringing Clint’s attention back to him. “Are you okay?”

It was the exact same question he’d asked not thirty seconds ago, but there was something different there. Like he was asking for a secret. Like he knew what he’d find under Clint’s shirt and long sleeves if he were to look.

“I’m fine,” Clint repeated, and this time he said it looking straight in Bruce’s eyes with _don’t_ written there plainly.

Bruce took the hint and backed off slowly, but he was clenching his teeth tightly. Clint could see it in the way his jaw jutted out through his cheek.

“Get the fuck out Tony,” Natasha said, forcing her tone into levity. “Get in the back where you belong.”

“No!” Tony announced. “I will not!”

He was wrong. Bruce calmly opened the door, hooked his arms under Tony’s, and pulled him from the car to land sprawled in the parking lot. Clint forced himself to laugh as he stepped over Tony to reclaim his rightful spot.

“Not fair,” Tony gripped climbing into the back. “I’m at least making Steve sit in the middle.”

Steve, who was just now walking over from where he’d been saying goodbye to Sam at his car, shouted that he would do no such thing. By the time the scuffle was settled, with Tony firmly stuck in the middle of the back seat, Clint was laughing for real.

***

Steve was talking about the upcoming end-of-semester paper in their mutual English class as Natasha drove up to his house. They’d dropped Tony and Bruce off at their cars in the otherwise-empty school parking lot, and then headed for Steve’s house.

Clint was twisting around to look behind him so he could more easily join Steve in complaining about the ridiculously vague nature of their final prompt, when Steve suddenly stopped talking, looking behind Clint out the front windshield, mouth slightly agape.

“Oh my god,” he breathed, and Natasha quickly echoed him.

Clint barely had time to turn around and look at Steve’s house, before Steve had thrown open the door of the still-moving car and half-jumped half-fallen out of the vehicle.

“Steve!” Natasha shouted throwing on her brakes, but then he was up and running again. Clint leaned forward so he could better see out the front, and his eyes suddenly landed on a small dark figure curled up on Steve’s front porch.

“Oh,” Clint breathed. “Oh my god.”

Natasha shoved her foot down on the gas pedal, lurching the car forward the last few feet, and then slammed on the brake, and turned off the car. Then she bailed out just about as quickly at Steve had, and Clint was right behind her.

Clint hadn’t ever met Bucky, but he didn’t need to have met him to know that that was who this was. He ended up hanging back just at the switch from sidewalk to private property, and even Natasha slowed to a stop just a few paces ahead of him. There was something sacred about this moment, and they stood still in silent awe.

Steve had gotten down practically on his hands and knees, moving slowly forward with one arm outstretched. He paused for a moment, when the approaching proximity made Bucky curl up tighter, but then he continued more slowly.

“Buck?” he breathed, finally laying his hand down gently on his lost friend’s hand. “Hey. Bucky?”

Like lightening, Bucky shoved himself away, scooting backwards across the porch until his back was flush with the wall of the house behind him. Instead of following, Steve just sat down where he was on the concrete next to the grass.

“Do you want to go inside?” he asked quietly.

Bucky shook his head violently.

“Do you want to say out here?” Steve tried again.

Again, violent head shaking.

“Do you know what it is that you do what?”

More head shaking.

“That’s all right,” Steve said gently. “I don’t mind waiting till you figure it out. Do you mind if I talk to you while we wait? You don’t have to say anything back, I just want to talk. Is that okay?”

This time there was a pause, and then some hesitant nodding.

Natasha turned and stepped back to where Clint was standing.

“We should go,” she said quietly. “This isn’t for us to see, and I doubt our presence is going to help much.”

“Should we call somebody?” Clint asked, though he wasn’t sure exactly who they would call.

“Probably,” Natasha agreed. “But I’m not willing to sacrifice my friendship with Steve for that. He’d never forgive me. I think we’re just going to have to trust him. No one knows Bucky like Steve does. And no one knows Steve like Bucky does. They’ll figure it out.”

“How has he been surviving?” Clint asked, not really expecting answer, as he climbed back into the car.

“I don’t think I want to know,” Natasha answered, pausing where she sat in the driver’s seat to type out a text. Clint leaned over to look at it and saw that it was to Steve, and it read, “Call if you need anything. ANYTHING.”

Then she put her phone down and started the car, pulling away from the curb carefully, and then driving away from where Steve and Bucky were still sitting. Steve was pulling grass out of the lawn next to where he sat, slowly dropping it into a growing pile on his lap. He was still talking, though he wasn’t looking at Bucky, and Bucky had uncurled a little. Enough, at least, to lean his head back on the wall behind him.

That was how they were when Natasha drove them out of sight.

“Holy shit,” Clint breathed. “What a day.”

“No kidding,” Natasha agreed. “Hey, grab my phone and text Sam about what happened. He won’t see it for a while – he’s a stickler for the don’t-text-and-drive thing – but I want him to know as soon as he gets back.

Clint did as he was told, typing out each word carefully. This wasn’t the kind of message you wanted typos in.

“Hey,” Natasha said, just as he hit send. “So, how are you?”

Clint stiffened, clenching his jaw as he slipped the phone back into Natasha’s purse.

“Meaning?” he asked carefully.

“Meaning you’ve been carrying yourself like you’re in pain and meaning you specifically said that you were trying out a new ‘no secrets from your girlfriend’ lifestyle.”

Clint thought about it, rolling his tongue between his teeth and considering all the possible consequences.

“Yeah, fine,” he said eventually. “My dad and I kind of got into it last night. Not the worst I’ve ever had, by far. It was quick.”

“Because you were out all night?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” Clint laughed, causing Natasha to glance at him out of the corner of her eye. “I got to meet Ragnarok members. Hello!? Worth it!”

He could see that that statement did little to comfort her. In fact, it seemed to upset her further, if the way she clenched her jaw and the way her knuckles whitened against the steering wheel was any indication.

“About Bruce,” he said, to attempt at least a semi-distraction. “Um, did you tell him? About my dad?”

“God, no,” Natasha said quickly. “Why?”

“He just…he seemed to know. Something about the way he was looking at me.”

Natasha made a sound of understanding and then opened and closed her mouth a few times, trying to start sentences but not getting any of them past a few words.

“Just spit it out,” Clint said, eventually.

“It’s not that easy,” she protested. “It’s not my secret to reveal. Just...I don’t want to betray confidence like that. But Bruce? He has a good eye for that kind of thing. Better than me, apparently. Um…you should ask him about his dad, sometime. Maybe.”

“Fuck,” Clint breathed. “Do all father’s suck?”

“I don’t think so,” Natasha laughed. “I hear that Steve’s was pretty cool. Maybe it’s just us. Like you said last night. Birds of a feather, and all that. Maybe we find each other before we even know it.”

“Yeah, maybe” Clint sighed, looking out the window. Then, “Hey, wait. Where are we going? This is the way back to your house. You still need to drop me off.”

“As if,” Natasha scoffed. “I’ve had some pretty intense first aid classes on the army bases. I’m taking you home and taking a look.”

“Fuck that,” Clint spat, feeling his anger start to rise again.

“Don’t argue with me on this!” Natasha shouted, and his brief rising anger quailed at her own.

“You said you weren’t going to get involved,” he muttered quietly, slumping down in his seat as far as his bruised ribs would let him.

“Just stop, Clint. This has not been an easy few hours. Sam was great, but Bucky, who is clearly not doing well, and then you with last night. Or, I guess it was yesterday morning really. It’s just…it’s one thing to know it’s happening and another to face the consequences. Plus, my dad wasn’t too happy with the fact that I’d been out all night, either. He and I kind of had a bad one last night. He threatened to pull me out of public school, since I had practically blackmailed him into letting me go in the first place.”

“Oh, shit.”

“It’s fine,” she said dismissively. “I might have taken him seriously a month ago, but I already have my early decision acceptance to Bryn Mawr. He’s not going to pull me out.”

“Oh, shit,” Clint said again, for entirely different reasons. That low-key anxiety was back in his stomach. Graduation was coming far too quickly, and things were already getting set in stone without his input.

“No kidding,” Natasha sighed, mistaking the reason for his distress.

“He’s not there, is he?” Clint asked. “Your dad?”

“Hell, no,” she spat. “He’s at work and will be till late. I wouldn’t take you there if he was home. I definitely couldn’t face him right now. I’d do something incredibly stupid and irreversible.”

She was still angry, but it seemed to be at her father and at life in general, rather than at Clint’s situation alone.

“I really fucking hate him,” she said. Her words were quiet, but something about them sent a shiver through Clint’s body.

“I know,” Clint said.

“No, like, I _really_ fucking hate him.”

“I know,” Clint said again. “I get it.”

But something about the set of her twisting lips and the coldness in her eyes made him think that maybe he didn’t really.


	7. Sailors Take Warning

He should have hesitated before he pulled off his shirt. He should have warned her, or explained, or talked about how bruises look when they’re going to heal just fine but it’s almost impossible to believe that when you’re staring at them. But the truth of it was that he hadn’t thought about those things in a long time. Bruises and small cuts and deep aching pains had all long ago faded from importance in his mind. It didn’t occur to him to remember that the same would not be true of Natasha.

“Holy fucking shit,” she gasped, jerking her hands back from where she’d been just about to touch him.

He should have taken his shirt off more slowly. He should have tried harder to keep this from happening. He should not have quietly followed her into the bathroom and followed her orders to sit down on the long empty counter.

“Clint,” she said. “Clint. I just…Clint.”

“My hearing aids are on,” he tried to joke. “You don’t have to keep saying my name. I can hear you just fine.”

She didn’t laugh. She ran her fingers through her hair and took a step back, as though trying to distance her reality from the actual reality before her.

“Holy fucking shit,” she breathed again.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said, attempting a different tactic.

“That doesn’t mean _shit_!” she shouted. “It can be a thousand times better than it looks and still be really fucking bad. God, Clint, are you looking at yourself?”

“I assure you,” Clint said dryly. “I’ve seen it plenty of times. I have no desire to look again.”

“This isn’t--”

“So, you said you got into Bryn Mawr?” he deflected.

Natasha took a deep breath. In fact, she took several. She even turned around and took a moment to breath without facing him – giving Clint more than enough time to remind himself that this was why he didn’t tell people about his personal life – and then finally came back with a fake smile plastered on her face.

“Yeah, totally did. I hadn’t really thought a lot about colleges, but when the early acceptance came in, it just seemed right. Dad actually bought me a house to use in the area, once I’d accepted. It’s way too big. I’m gonna have to find roommates and stuff. Still, it’s not all that far from here. So, if you don’t end up moving out there with me, we can still visit and stuff.”

Out of the frying pan and into the fire. At least he’d been mentally preparing himself for this conversation for a while, unlike the rest of what was happening today. Natasha had returned to his side, although she didn’t seem to be in any hurry to attempt any kind of first aid. She was just gently running her fingers along his bruises. Softly enough that it didn’t hurt at all.

She was still furious. He could tell, without a shadow of a doubt. She was practically vibrating with it, but she was still making an effort to appear calm and collected, for his sake. And he appreciated it. He doubted he could have this current conversation if her anger was still too evident.

“You don’t have to do that,” Clint said.

“Do what?”

“Talk about us like we have to keep going. I understand how college works. You don’t have to pretend that you…” He started to trail off at the sudden look that Natasha gave him. He’d thought she was angry before, but that had had nothing on the unbridled rage in her eyes as she stared right into his.

“What that actual _fuck_ are you talking about?” she snarled.

“Just…you know. Future things.”

“Clint Barton, are you actually suggesting to me that I dump your ass because I’m going off to college? Are you actually, right now, suggesting that having _someone else_ drop out of my life without warning, would be a _positive fucking change in my life_?”

She was literally screaming, and Clint hunched down in on himself at the noise of it. His hearing aids were threatening to feedback.

“Sorry,” he whimpered, but she didn’t seem to notice what she was doing to him. In fact, she stepped back and threw the cooling washcloth she’d been holding. It flew across the room and into the wall, where it slid down to land on the floor with a wet plop.

“Don’t _do_ this to me!” she yelled. “Not today! I cannot go from the image of Bucky dirty and curled up on the porch to you and these bruises across your skin, to this half-ass attempt of yours to break up with me. I can’t!”

“I’m not!” Clint cried. “I’m not breaking up with you. God, Natasha, I’m never breaking up with you. That’s what I told your dad. That’s what I told him that day. I told him I’m not breaking up with you, even though I knew how this was ending.”

“Knew how this was ending?” she screamed. And wow, that was a high pitch that Clint hadn’t thought was humanly possible. It burst through the threshold on his hearing aids, whining up into a high-pitched shriek of feedback that reverberated through both ears. He ducked down, automatically reaching up to cover his ears on some leftover evolutionary instinct, but the noise faded away against before he could think about yanking anything out.

“You can’t be serious!” Clint snapped back, when the pain had faded. “Talk about ‘uptown girl’, Natasha. People hardly ever stay with their high school sweethearts even when the relationship makes sense! And our relationship does anything _but_ make sense. Your father bought you a house, Natasha! He just bought you a motherfucking _house_ in another city because you’ll probably go there for college.”

“This is what you told him,” Natasha seethed. She’d dropped her voice when Clint had flinched and covered his ears, but the anger hadn’t faded from her voice any. “My father. You told him not to worry about me dating you, because I would dump your ass the moment I got a better offer!”

“Not like that,” Clint tried to protest. “Just that you deserved better, and I knew it. Just that…I understood, you know?” He tried to make his tone placating, but it wasn’t doing shit.

“That’s what you think of me? After all these months, _that’s_ what you think of me. That I give a shit about that kind of thing?”

“You’re not being fair. It’s not a commentary on your moral paradigms. It’s commentary on how fucking difficult relationships are! It’s hard enough to make something last when people are from the same world. It’s just realistic to understand that our relationship has added difficulties. The odds just weren’t in our favor.”

Natasha opened her mouth, probably to say something else that would completely ignore the point that Clint was trying to make, but she was stopped by sudden noises downstairs.

“Emma?” Clint asked quietly.

“Out shopping,” Natasha snapped back. “Only one person on the fucking earth that that could be. Guess my dad came home before dinner, for once.”

She stalked over toward the bathroom door, and Clint hurried to jump off the counter and put a hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t,” he said quietly.

“You forget I’m pissed as fuck at you right now,” she spat. “And ’m going to have it out with my father, no matter your opinion. You’re the one who told him that bullshit about not being good enough for me, but he’s the one who believed it. He thought I was capable of something like that, too.”

She shoved past Clint and into the hallway, marching down the stairs with movements so calm that it set Clint’s teeth on edge.

“Natasha,” her father greeted her from the living room. He had been looking at his phone, and had barely glanced up at her entrance. “Nice to see you home. Have a good day at school?”

“Dad,” she said, “I need to talk to you.”

“Not right now, sweetheart,” he said, glancing up from the phone again. This time, he spotted Clint standing behind Natasha, stalled at the bottom of the stairs, and his mouth turned down in a frown. “What is that boy doing here?”

“His name is Clint, and I said that I need to talk to you. I need to talk to you right now.”

“And I said I’m busy. We can talk tonight at dinner, as a family.”

It was probably the worst thing he could have said. In one sentence he both excluded Clint again and reminded Natasha that their “family” dinner would be short one family member.

Natasha stood silently for a moment, and then walked calmly over to an end table that stood against the wall. She opened the drawer, reached it, and pulled out…

Gun.

Motherfucking gun.

Again.

Clint felt every muscle in his body lock up. His heart rate jacked up as the room spun and he hyperventilated so quickly that his fingers started tingling before Natasha even spoke again.

“Let’s try that again,” she said sweetly. “I said, ‘dad, I need to talk to you,’ and then you say…?”

The man turned around, prepared to dismiss his daughter again, but then his eyes widened at the weapon pointed at him.

“And you say...?” Natasha repeated again.

Clint had seen her sign. He’d seen her fight. He’d seen her scale walls and lie to teachers. There was no doubt in his mind that the girl who could do those thing, would not stand there with confidence in her stance and in her grip unless she damn well knew how to operate that weapon.

Her father apparently had a similar thought process, because he slowly lowered his phone and blinked once before saying, “What do you want to talk about, Natasha?”

“I want to talk about a lot of things, actually. I want to talk about Clint, and how you apparently think he’s so beneath me that I’ll abandon him the moment I come to my senses. I want to talk about this household, and the way that you used to yell at me for laughing too loud. I want to talk about my mother, and where the fuck you got the audacity to consider yourself so far above another human being that you could actually kick her out of this house. Out of my life. Without so much as a fucking phone number to keep in contact.”

Her father opened her mouth like he was going to make a comment, but Natasha was still going, and he wisely held his tongue.

“Is that why you think I’ll abandon Clint? Because you think I’m like you? Because you think that I’ll blink and realize, just like you did, that I need out if I’m going to fulfill my full ‘potential’?”

“Natasha,” Clint said quietly. He was forcing himself to take deep breaths, realizing that he couldn’t just stand on the sidelines for this. He couldn’t let that happen again. He couldn’t just stand helpless while another person he loved fired another gun into another man’s head. He couldn’t lose someone like that again.

“Natasha,” he said again. “I can’t let you do this.”

“Like you can fucking stop me?” she snapped. “Don’t forget that I’m pissed at you, too.”

“So what?” Clint scoffed. “You going to shoot me?”

“Just shut the fuck up, Clint. Right now, this is between me and my father.”

“But it’s not,” her father interjected. “You’ve made it about him by doing this in front of him. If you really do care for him--”

“Love him!” Natasha snapped, and wow wasn’t that a fantastic moment for that declaration.

“Love him,” her father capitulated. “If you really love him, you wouldn’t make him an accomplice like this.”

“This isn’t about him!” Natasha yelled, taking a step forward, weapon still raised. Even though it had been at the beginning. “This is about my mother!”

“She was bipolar, Natasha. She was bipolar and lied to me about it. She lied about her family, and herself. Did I deserve to endure that? She’s better off without me, too. Neither of us should have had to put up with someone who wasn’t happy with the other. She couldn’t have been happy in this life. She wasn’t happy in this life. She was bipolar.”

Clint could hear the revolver cock, as Natasha pulled the hammer down with her thumb. Her aim didn’t so much as waver as she completed the motion.

“I know,” she seethed. “I’ve known for a long time, you worthless shit. I probably knew longer than you did, and knowing didn’t harm my relationship with her at _all_.”

She was pointing a loaded gun at her father’s head. Loaded and cocked and held in a hand that wasn’t so much as trembling.

This was murder. This was premeditated.

“Of course you knew,” her father sneered, clearly losing all sense of self-preservation. “It looks like you certainly got _that_ from her in the genetics.”

“No, no, no,” Natasha smiled sweetly. “This? This vengeance and this violent anger? This, I got from you, daddy. This is all you.”

“And what are you going to do with the body?” Clint asked. He’d been searching for something to say for the last minute and a half, and that had been the only thing he’d come up with.

“I told you to shut the fuck up, Clint.”

“I’m just being practical. If you want to kill him, then let’s kill him. Heaven knows you know my opinions on patricide. I’m just saying, what are you going to do with the body? Or are you going to claim self-defense and not hide it at all? We could maybe put a tarp down, and make him stand on it, but that’s pretty clearly premeditation. Do you think that Emma would help us clean up without telling on us?”

He was rambling and didn’t even have a point that he was trying to come to. Still, the whole thing was pretty much worth the look on her father’s face when he glanced at it. A weird mixture of hatred and disbelief, all over shadowed by a deepening fear. Like he was only just now realizing that Natasha might mean it.

“Emma,” Natasha echoed, and Clint could tell that she was imagining the woman’s face if she came in and found her charge had committed murder.

“Yeah, Emma,” Clint pressed, pushing against the chink in the armor of irrational anger that Natasha had wrapped herself in. “How do you think she’ll react?”

“I don’t…” For the first time, the weapon in her hand wavered, and she took her eyes off her father and focused them on Clint. Clint took it as an invitation to move forward, quickly and calmly closing the distance between himself and Natasha.

He should have been panicking. Loud noises made him jump a mile high. Raised voices made him cower where he stood. Family conflict meant he fled the room.

He should have been panicking, but he couldn’t make himself do any such thing. Somehow, instead, this seemed perfectly natural. They were standing in a living room the size of his house and calmly having a discussion about the clean-up of a body that wasn’t even dead yet. It must be a Monday.

Natasha’s eyes were flicking back and forth between Clint and her father, as though trying to figure out which one of them was telling the truth. Like one of those doors with two guards, and only one of them will give you a true answer.

 _I love you_ , Clint signed, forcing her to look at him. _I love how nothing is partial with you. You love it or you hate it. No middle ground. I love how you laugh, because you laugh even harder when other people laugh. I love the words you choose when you speak, and I love that you can sign. I love that you never leave me alone in crowded rooms, and that you always know where I am, and that you took us to the cave so I could learn to love your friend. So that I could learn to have friends, at all._

“Steve,” she said, no longer looking at her father at all.

“Yeah, Steve,” Clint confirmed. “And Bucky. And Tony and Bruce and college and getting away from here.”

“And you,” she added.

“And me,” he agreed. “Always me. Forever me. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going to leave you. Please don’t leave me either. I can’t survive someone leaving me again.”

She seemed to realize, suddenly, how eerily this moment must be echoing the moment Barney crossed the line from brother to murderer. She shuddered once, had the presence of mind to release the hammer, and then dropped the revolver.

Then Natasha turned and fled. She moved out of the room and out of sight before Clint could even consider whether or not to go after her. He decided against it, though. She was too fast and, besides, he had things to do here.

He leaned down and picked up the gun, weighing it carefully in his palm. Then he looked up at Natasha’s father.

“You know,” he said calmly. “I bet that you thought this wasn’t a position you’d ever find yourself in with me. Hmm? How long, do you think, before Emma gets home?”

“You said--” the man began, but his throat was thick with fear and he had to stop and clear it before he could make himself understood.

“You said you wouldn’t leave her,” he finally managed. “You can’t shoot me either.”

“Yeah,” Clint sighed. “I guess not. Shame.”

He looked down at the weapon, giving it a once over and quickly, and then curling up a bit to wipe his and Natasha’s fingerprints off. Just in case.

Then he smiled, holding the weapon in his shirt, and walked over to deposit it back in the end table drawer.

“Well,” he said. “Looks like I saved your life. Weird huh? And, I’d probably move that gun somewhere else, if I were you. Hell, I’d probably move _yourself_ someone else, if I were you. For a while, at least. Fly to Europe. Tour the isles. Whatever it is that rich people do.”

Then he calmly slid the door shut and walked out into the driveway. Natasha’s car was gone, but he wasn’t really surprised.

A few months ago, he would have been in trouble. He would have been stuck miles away from his home, and in a neighborhood that wouldn’t allow him to wander around in it for very long before it called the cops. Now, though. Now he had options.

He considered them quickly, and decided on Bruce. Steve was probably busy with Bucky and Tony…Tony meant well, but he needed something that wasn’t oblivious excitement about the world.

He pulled out his phone and dialed, waited the few moments of ringing, and then smiled at Bruce’s voice, even though he couldn’t be seen.

“Hey, Bruce? I’m in a bit of a jam. Could you come pick me up at Natasha’s house and drive me home?”

“Sure,” Bruce said. Clint could hear surprise in the man’s voice, but he could also hear the noises of sudden motion. “Of course. I’m leaving now.”

“Thanks,” Clint said, and hung up. He knew Bruce would probably have a lot to say in the car, when he got there, but Clint was glad that he hadn’t had to face any right off the bat. Now he had time to think everything over.

He was shaking.

So, maybe thinking it over wasn’t the best option, but it was too late now. Every moment was replaying and replaying and Clint felt like he was going to throw up. He’d heard the phrase “cold dread” before, but he didn’t think it was quite accurate. This was more of a warm dread. Heavy and uncomfortable against his stomach, like the claustrophobic feeling that comes with wearing too many layers in too much heat.

What if the police were being called right now? What if they showed up with squealing tires before Bruce could get here? What if something happened and Bruce couldn’t come and Clint was stuck here? What if Natasha drove away and never came back? What if she came back to her home tonight and decided to finished what she’d started anyway? She wouldn’t need a gun. She could probably kill a man with her bare hands.

He stood still, shaking and hyperventilating, letting his mind drag him around in pointless circles and potential disasters until he blinked and realized that Bruce was parked in front of him against the curb. He had the passenger side window rolled down and was leaning over to call out the window and wave his arms.

“Oh,” Clint said, with a start. “Sorry.”

He climbed in quickly, and buckled his seatbelt, staring straight ahead out the windshield.

“Where’s Natasha?” Bruce asked.

“No clue. Mexico, maybe?”

“She take her passport out of her room?” Bruce asked.

“No.”

“Well. All right then. Probably not Mexico.”

Then Bruce pulled away from the curb, and didn’t say another word all the way home. Clint could have kissed him for it.

***

Unfortunately, he did decide to walk Clint to the door. Even though Clint could see his dad’s car in the driveway and tried every manipulation tactic he knew to get Bruce to just drive away.

“Clint,” the other teen finally said. “I know what you’re trying to do. And I have to tell you, I haven’t had the greatest couple of days either. Nor do I have the greatest father. I’m kind of wound up right now, and this isn’t helping. Just let me walk you up, so I can reassure myself that you’re gonna be okay.”

Which would have helped if Clint had had the slightest self-assurance that everything would be anything near okay. The hour was way too late for assurances. Still, in the end, he didn’t have the energy to argue, and Bruce ended up standing at his door when Clint opened it.

His father was on the other side. Drunk as fuck and Clint did _not_ have the energy to deal with that. Not today. Not like this. Thank god his mother was at work right now, because today was the kind of day where he wasn’t going to engage. He was just going to curl up and wait for everything to be over.

“Where the _fuck_ have you been?” Harold slurred.

“Sir,” Bruce said, waving his hand a little to get the man’s attention. “Sorry I kept him out so late. Clint and I were working on a homework project together, and I lost track of time. My bad.”

“It’s my son’s responsibility to get home,” Harold insisted. “I don’t care who the fuck you are, you little shit.”

“Dad,” Clint tried, unable to completely let a comment like that go.

It was the wrong thing to do. His father narrowed his eyes at the quiet syllable, reached out through the open door, and backhanded his son in the face. Clint would have fallen over with the force of it, if Bruce hadn’t caught his sleeve and pulled him back upright.

“Fuck no,” Bruce breathed. “Not again.”

He took a step forward, dropped his shoulder, and shoved Harold backwards. The man stumbled and fell, confused by the returned violence, and then it was too late. Bruce was straddling him and punching. Just, punching. It reminded Clint of his first real meeting with Natasha. How she’d beaten the hell out of Brock and Grant.

Except, it wasn’t like that at all. Natasha had scared him at the time, sure. But until this moment, looking down at Bruce, Clint hadn’t realize how in control Natasha had been. He hadn’t recognized it, but compared to this, it was obvious.

Bruce? Bruce was not in control. For the second time in as many hours, Clint found it his responsibility to keep one of his friends from committing murder. Because that was where this was heading.

“Stop,” Clint cried out, trying to grab Bruce’s arm. He got an elbow to his nose for his trouble, seeing black and falling backwards under the impact. He blinked through the white-hot shot of pain and tried to wipe away the blood that was starting to gush from his nose. He could taste the coppery salt of it in his mouth. Again.

He was getting really tired of the taste of blood.

He struggled to his feet, looked at Bruce – who was now screaming a string of unintelligible words – and then looked around the room for something to throw. He settled on a couch cushion, not wanting to actually hurt his friend. He struggled with it for a moment, it was heavier than he’d expected, but then managed to wrestle it free and throw it at Bruce.

It landed perfectly, right on his head, and Bruce stopped hitting and twisted around.

“What the fuck?” he spat.

“Bruce,” Clint said, raising his hands out in front of him. “Stop.”

“Your bleeding,” Bruce said, then blinked and seemed to consider the statement. He looked down at what he was doing, where Clint’s father was moaning weakly, and scrambled backwards and to his feet with a start.

“You okay?” Clint asked.

“I’m fucking fine,” Bruce snapped. “Just…fuck! You’re bleeding.”

“Yeah.”

“I did that?”

Clint didn’t respond, not sure which answer would be worse.

“We should go,” Bruce said, and started for the door, catching hold of Clint’s sleeve and drawing him with him.

“No, wait. Hang on, Bruce. I don’t know.”

Clint head was spinning, and though he could definitely see the benefit of not being here anymore, he also wasn’t sure he wanted to get in a car with Bruce right now. Something was off about the guy, and fuck did his nose hurt.

Bruce, however, didn’t really take no for an answer. When he felt Clint resisting him, he stepped back and leaned down, quickly flipping Clint up into a fireman's carry. He didn’t even seem to notice the weight, as Clint caught his breath at the sudden manhandling. It didn’t even occur to him to maybe struggle. He was way too out of his depth.

He was deposited – not gently – next to the passenger side door, and only briefly considered running. Then he got in the car. He also considered offering to drive, but he shoved that thought away, as well.

Still, he did watch Bruce with trepidation. His hands were shaking, white-knuckled on the steering wheel, and the guy was muttering under his breath as he pulled away from the curb and floored the gas. Clint scrambled to buckle his seatbelt, and pulled his knees up on the seat, to make himself as small as possible. Then he buried his face in his knees, ignoring his throbbing nose, and began to cry.

It started out as little sniffling but it spiraled down quickly, and soon it was uncontrollable heaving hysterical sobs. He didn’t notice that Bruce had stopped the car, until he felt a gentle hand on his shoulder. He jerked his head up with a gasp, but he couldn’t stop sobbing. He could, however, see that they’d pulled over into an empty parking lot.

“Hey,” Bruce soothed him. “You’re okay. I’m…I’m okay. Sorry. I’m okay now. Fuck, I’m really sorry. That was 100% the _last_ thing you needed to happen right then. I’m so sorry. And about your nose, too. Sorry.”

He bit his lip then, falling silent and pulling his hand back, realizing that maybe Clint didn’t want to be touched at all, especially by him. But the calm words had had their effect, and Clint had been crying long enough that his body was starting to give up anyway, so he took a few forcefully deep breaths.

“It’s fine,” he managed. “Or, well, I’m fine. Just…it’s fine. Everything’s fine.”

He took the napkins that Bruce was offering him and blew his nose and did his best in wiping his face.

“I have a bit of a temper,” Bruce said unnecessarily. “Sorry. I should have let you go up there on your own. You probably could have handled it. I knew I was close to snapping. I shouldn’t have risked it.”

He fell silent and handed Clint another napkin.

“Thanks,” Clint said softly. “Um, now what?”

“You can’t go home,” Bruce said quickly, as though Clint might decide to disagree with him again.

“No, I know. Not for tonight, at least. Can’t go to Natasha’s either.”

“Yeah, I tried to call her while you were…um, busy. Yeah. She didn’t pick up. And you were there when Bucky showed up, so you know about that. Um…we can call Tony? I mean, I’d offer you my couch, because my mom is pretty chill, but I don’t know if you really want to be near me right now.”

“No, I…you’re fine,” Clint stammered. “I just…um. You said something about your dad? I don’t know if I can handle a dad right now.”

“My dad’s dead,” Bruce said without preamble. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

“Oh,” Clint said, feeling the catch in his breathing start to slow down and lessen. “Okay then. Can I crash at your house? I feel like I need to sleep for eight years.”

“Yeah,” Bruce said, with an almost-smile. “No problem.”


	8. Denouement

Clint had wondered if maybe he wouldn’t remember where he was when he woke up. He’d heard people talk about the initial confusion that comes with a new location, and his last thoughts as he drifted away on the couch were about whether or not he would experience that phenomenon.

He didn’t. He woke up to the sounds of breakfast being made in the kitchen near him, and he realized immediately where he was. That was probably Bruce’s mom in the kitchen, doing something like pancakes. Something normal. Something that Clint didn’t think he could take right now.

Rude as it was, he fished his phone off the floor where it had fallen, checked his back pocket for his hearing aids, and made for the door. He half-expected to be stopped by someone in the house, but he made it out without the slightest interference.

Which left him with the problem of what to do now. He didn’t have any more options than he had had several hours ago. In fact, in retrospect he would have been better off staying inside and getting a ride to school.

School. The thought turned his stomach just about as much as the thought of pancakes had. He stared down at his phone, which was dying very quickly, and flipped through his options again. If he could make it a few miles away from Bruce’s, then he might be able to call Tony and get a ride. Or, maybe he could just lie face down in the pavement and wait for something to happen.

God, he’d made so many decisions in the last twenty-four hours. He didn’t think he could handle this anymore. Maybe he should have just bolted from Bruce and slept in his own backyard. Then he could have gone for the bus, at least.

Although, that still left him at school. Then again, awful as school might be, it might be a preferable option to wandering the streets. He didn’t even know where he was really. He didn’t remember much of the drive to Bruce’s house.

Unsure what else to do, he started walking. Just picked a direction and started moving. He was staring down at his phone – and his feet – sure that there must be some sort of solution in there somewhere that it just wasn’t telling him. This wasn’t four months ago. This wasn’t him standing on the edge of Dusquene’s property, unsure what to do except walk until his feet bled and he finally made the house by the time the sun was setting.

And with that memory, an errant thought made it all the way from his mind to his fingers, and he was suddenly dialing the number that hand burned itself into this brain. Ten digits strung out together and reaching across the continent to who-knows-where to connect him with his brother.

He held his phone to his ear for a moment, wondered at the lack of a ringing noise, and then swore and dug for his hearing aids. He managed to get one in by the time someone picked up on the other end grimaced at the desperate, “Hello? Hello? Clint?” on the other end.

“Yeah, I’m here,” Clint responded, trying to hold the phone with one hand and shove his other hearing aid in with the other. “What?”

“Oh my god,” his brother breathed from the other end. “I thought you’d never call. Like, literally. I thought you weren’t going to call. I kept sending the postcards and--”

“Because you’re a fucking idiot. What the hell with those, Barney? You’re lucky as fuck that dad never found them. He would have turned you in in a heartbeat.”

“It’s a burner phone, it’s not like--,” Barney tried.

“Shut up, it was stupid, and I’m not taking argument on that point.”

“Ok fine, it was stupid. But I was desperate enough that the stupid was worth the risk. I didn’t know how else to get in contact with you.”

“You could have just fucking called me,” Clint muttered.

“Would you have wanted me to?”

And that was the obnoxious part right there. If Barney had called, Clint would have hung up every time. But with the number being there, imprinted in his mind, he had the thought there. Just hanging there, until he made the decision on his own. So now, he had no one to blame but himself.

“So,” Clint sighed. “Where are you?”

“Nope. Nu-huh. I’m not putting that kind of thing on you. Plausible deniability, and all that. Suffice to say that I’m doing well, and I’ve got everything figured out for now. I feel like shit for leaving you and mom there, but something was going to happen eventually.”

“Yeah,” Clint said. “Something. Something was going to happen.”

Barney made a noise of annoyance on the other end of the line, and Clint almost smiled. It was so achingly familiar. So perfectly like Barney was standing in front of the fridge trying to make breakfast while Clint was being nothing but unreasonable about it.

“What?” he asked. “You’re annoyed at me. What is it?”

“You’re mad, aren’t you?” Barney laughed. “I’m sorry. It’s probably not funny, but I just now realized why you’re so mad at me. Why it took you so long to call.”

“Because you murdered a man in front of me?” Clint said dryly.

“No. Because I murdered the wrong man.”

Clint didn’t have anything to say to that. He thought that there probably should be something for him to say to that, but nothing was coming to mind. In fact there was nothing in his head at all except for the ringing persistence in the way the phone sounded against his ears. He pulled the phone away from his head and switched it to speaker phone so he could hold it a little ways away. It made everything sound a little less awkward. A little less wrong.

“Look, Clint,” Barney sighed. “I couldn’t have done that any more than you could have. In fact, for the record, I had no intention of committing murder at all. It just…happened.”

Twenty-four hours ago, Clint might have snapped at that in disbelief, but he remembered Natasha’s face as she looked at her father over the edge of the gun, and the way her eyes had widened suddenly at her mental reintroduction to reality.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said, grinning a little at the ridiculous situation. “Look, my phone is about to die. Like, for real. So, I’m going to have to go right now. But I’ll call back. I promise.”

“Yeah, sure. Don’t be a stranger.”

Clint didn’t reply, tapping the end call button and shoving it back in his pocket.

He’d been walking while he talked, as usual, and hadn’t been thinking about where he was going, as usual. He glanced around, trying to figure out where he’d ended up, and was surprised to find he was about to enter the outer edges of a shopping mall. He could see a coffee shop nearby enough, and he altered his course a little to head for it.

He allowed himself the last quarter of a mile or so to just not think about anything. He didn’t even count footsteps, which was something he’d done in the past to get him through time. Instead, he just let his mind disappear, until he was pulling on the door.

The inside of the shop was warm and dark, and the woman behind the counter was leaning against the edge and reading a book where she stood. However, when Clint took a few steps forward, she closed it quickly and gave him her full attention.

“What can I get you?” she grinned at him.

Clint dug around in his pockets and managed to find a couple dollar bills. He glances up at the board above him, cleared his throat of the cold air from outside, and said, “Coffee. Black?”

“No problem,” the girl said, and it was only a few moment after that that Clint was sitting at a table with his coffee and a dead phone.

That was the next order of business. The phone. A quick glance to his left revealed a girl with books in front of her and a phone that was the same make as Clint’s on the table.

It took him eleven minutes to work up the courage to ask if she had a charger. He knew it took him eleven minutes, because there was a fancy wooden clock hanging on the wall in perfect sight, reminding him of every lost moment of his life.

“Hey,” he said finally, having to clear his throat yet again, in order to get the word out in even a semi-intelligent manner.

The girl glanced up at him, seeming surprised but not concerned by his drawing her attention to him.

“I um,” he continued. “I’m kind of in a bit of trouble. I don’t have a ride, and my phone died. And um…it looks like…um, can I--”

“Oh my gosh,” the girl said, already reaching down into her backpack. “Here, use my charger. There’s a plug right next to you.”

“Thank you so much,” Clint said, his first real smile of the day lighting up his face.

He scrambled with the unfamiliar charger for a few moments, and then sighed with relief when the “charging” symbol lit up. He put his head down on the table, resting his forehead on his arms and holding the warm coffee cup between his hand. It felt good. Warm and languid and nothing like yesterday had been.

That was his last fully-conscious thought before he woke up with a start to a touch against his shoulder. He twisted away from the contact, finally experiencing that disconcerting confusion that came with waking up in a new place. Go figure. Not in a strange house in a strange bed, but with his head on a table in front of strangers.

He realized, a little belatedly, that the hand had been the college girl’s whose charger he was using, and he tried to smile apologetically while he rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

“Sorry,” he said, reaching down to yank the charger out of the wall. “Didn’t mean to fall asleep. Long day.”

“It’s not problem,” the girl assured him. “I didn’t need it, and we’ve all had our fair share of sleeping on tables. Finals coming up?”

“Yeah,” Clint agreed, handing back the charger and figuring it was way easier than explaining that he wasn’t in college and was, in fact, playing hooky. “Rough month.”

“No kidding, Good luck.”

“You, too.”

Clint watched the girl leave, and then glanced up at the clock. He’d been out for a little over an hour. It was probably a miracle that no one had attempted to wake him up, but maybe the place was just used to students and their finals. Then again, it was also pretty empty. Maybe they just didn’t care, one way or another.

He sighed heavily and reached out to turn on his phone again. It was about halfway charged, which was either a testament to that charger or a hit against his phone battery. Either way, he was pulling up his contacts list when it began buzzing repeatedly with all the messages and calls he’d missed.

Shit. He should have expected that. There were at least four texts from Bruce, a couple texts from Tony – probably on prompting from Bruce – and nothing from Steve, who was probably also playing hooky today. He sighed, and flipped over to the missed calls, expecting them to also be from Bruce.

He was starting to feel a little guilty about bailing out like that, when he saw the missed calls. Fourteen of them, and all from Natasha. Call after call, all about five minutes apart. No messages. Just calls. Like she was trying to rag-doll her way through her problems.

Sure enough, just as Clint was trying to figure out what to do about that, the phone rang again. Natasha.

She’d know his phone was on. It was ringing, instead of doing whatever it did when phones were dead, so she’d know. So he sighed and picked up.

“What?” he sighed.

“Thank god, Clint. I didn’t know where you were. Bruce said you’d disappeared.”

“Oh my god,” Clint spat bitterly. “I can’t imagine what that feels like. Me, disappearing suddenly after a traumatic event. You, having no idea what to do or where to find me or if I’ll be coming back.”

“Clint,” Natasha started, and then fell silent. For the first time since he’d know her, she didn’t have anything to say. The silence just stretched along while they each tried to figure the other out.

“Look,” Clint finally relented. “I’m at the coffee place in the shopping mall right next to Bruce’s house. Just…come over.”

“Yeah, okay,” Natasha agreed eagerly. “I’m on my way right now. Seriously I’m already in the car.”

“Fantastic.”

He hung up, took a deep breath, and finally pulled his coffee toward him and took a sip. It was lukewarm, and it probably had tasted good when he first got it, but it was watery and bitter now. He drank it anyway, because he needed it, but he didn’t enjoy it.

Natasha came through the door more quickly than he’d anticipated. She must have been near Bruce’s trying to figure out where he’d gone, and the thought made him surprisingly forgiving.

Then again, he hadn’t been a far cry from forgiving in the first place. Maybe he really was pathetic. A pathetic pushover who couldn’t recognize the line in the sand between pushy and abusive, and willing to accept either as long as it was followed by a warm smile.

It didn’t matter either way. The moment Natasha pushed her way through the door and into his sight, his mouth twisted up into a smile and he felt a sickening relief at seeing her again. Everything else was background noise.

“Hey,” he greeted, standing up and pressing a quick kiss to her cheek. “Where’d you go?”

“Hotel,” she answer cautiously. “Um, what about you? I mean, I know you crashed at Bruce’s, but did you do anything else?”

“Hung out here,” Clint shrugged. “Guess some of us can’t just afford hotels at the drop of a dime.”

“Sorry,” Natasha said again.

“No, it’s fine.”

“Really? Because I thought that you would be pretty mad. I mean, you certainly have the right to be mad. I would be mad. Hell, I was mad because I didn’t know where you were for an hour. I can’t imagine how pissed you are at me right now.”

“I’m not pissed,” Clint shrugged. “But you owe me a fresh coffee. This one’s cold.”

“I can do that,” Natasha said hurriedly. “No problem.”

Clint wasn’t eager to repeat the previous days’ experiences, by any means, but overly-apologetic Nat was kind of fun. He laughed to himself as Natasha hurried to order him a coffee, rushed back when she realized that she didn’t know what kind he wanted, and then hurried back again to order.

When she brought the coffee over, she set it down in front of him, and then sat down quickly.

“Are you sure you don’t want something else besides just black coffee? Something more interesting?” she asked.

“I’m fine, Natasha. Just sit still for a moment. For once.”

“Right,” she said, smoothing imaginary wrinkles out of her shirt. “Right, okay. Let’s do this. Can I apologize first, or do you want to yell at me first?”

“I’m not going to yell at you, but I’d still like to start.”

“Sure. Yeah. Shoot.”

Clint snorted at her choice of words and said, “Yeah, maybe not with the shooting.” Then he put his hands up to silence her sudden rising tide of apologies. “Look, I’m not mad. I’m not thrilled, and you had better not do that to me again, but I’m not mad.”

“I tried to shoot a man in front of you.”

Clint shrugged. “Old news. I’m more concerned by the way that you ran. You just disappeared. You can’t do that, in the future. You can’t just run off, okay? No matter what. You decided that we were going to be a team. In fact, you seemed pretty violently opposed to us _not_ being a team. Am I wrong?”

“No! No, you’re right. I want us to stay a…a team.”

“Then you can’t fucking fly off in your fancy car at the hint of someone being mad at you.”

Natasha was looking down at her hands, twisting a paper napkin between her fingers. It was starting to fray and shred as she wound it tighter and tighter.

“I thought you were going to break up with me,” she admitted. “I know that’s not what you’d been trying to do in the bathroom, but that’s what it had felt like. And then I went and attempted murder, and you had to stop me, and I was sure that you were going to dump my sorry violent ass. I couldn’t face it.”

“I’m not going to dump your ass. In fact, I consider your ass a pretty fine part of the deal.”

“Yeah well,” she smiled softly. “It’s a pretty good ass.”

Her phone rang, and she glanced down at it, scrunching up her eyebrows at the string of numbers with no name to them. She pushed it a little to the side, and looked back up at Clint.

“Seriously, though,” she said. “You can be mad if you want.”

“I don’t want to be mad, Natasha. I want to be yours again. And I want you to be mine. Can we just, move past this? I mean, I really hope you don’t try to shoot anyone again, _ever_ , but I’m ready to be done. I’m too tired. Do you know how much energy it takes to fight? I don’t want to fight. I just want to be the afterward part. Deal?”

“Deal.”

They stared at each other for a moment, and Natasha’s phone chirped with a message.

“What?” she said down at it, then sighed. “They left a voicemail, hang on.”

“No problem, I gotta text Bruce to calm down anyway.”

Natasha nodded absentmindedly as she tapped at her phone, and then held it to her ear. Clint focused on his own phone for a moment, but suddenly had his attention redirected when Natasha reached out and grabbed his sleeve. He looked up, and her eyes were wide. They froze like that, for a moment, and then she pulled the phone away from her ear and tapped it onto speakerphone, and Clint was listening to a woman’s voice.

“ _—ing to catch you, but I guess not. That’s okay. I’m not sure what I could say anyway. I just wanted to let you know that I’m okay, and that I love you. I…I’m just………tell you what. I’ll call back tomorrow. How’s that? Yeah, I’ll call tomorrow. We can catch up. Exchange numbers. I don’t—_ ”

Natasha cut off the rest of the message, closing the voicemail and pulling up her call logs. Clint sat in nervous silence while she found the incoming number and called out. Moments of tense anticipation, and then—

“Mom!” Natasha cried out in breathlessness. “Mom, it’s me! Where are you?”

***

She didn’t turn out to be very far away. The money that her ex-husband had given her had run out, but she’d gotten a job at a diner. Natasha laughed, nearly hysterical but not quite, at that, saying that it was just so “on the nose” that she didn’t know how to respond.

Still, she was doing well, and Natasha was pretty much vibrating with relief. She refused to stand still. Or she was incapable of standing still. Either way, she babbled excited as she dragged Clint to her car, and continued the high-strung behaviour in the car, to the point that Clint was slightly nervous about her driving. Especially when he realized, yet again, that she was taking him to her house.

“Your dad?” Clint asked, when he realized.

“Gone,” she answered. “Flew out for Germany this morning. He left me a message on my phone, acting like nothing had happened. Or, at least, like nothing big had happened. Pretending that he was just leaving on a business trip. He’s going to be gone for months, and apparently I’m supposed to ‘grow up a little’ while he’s gone.”

“Yikes.”

“No kidding.”

That was the end of their conversation until they pulled up in Natasha’ driveway.

“Listen,” she said, putting a hand on Clint’s shoulder when he tried to get out. Then she fell silent again, seeming at a loss, facing Clint and fishing for words to say something that she didn’t quite want to say.

“I’m going to go see her,” she said eventually. “Like, right now.”

“Alone, right?” Clint asked, guessing at why she was nervous. “It should be just you.”

“You’re not going to be mad about that either? I mean, you just said about the whole ‘don’t run away from you’ thing.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. This isn’t you running away. This is you reuniting with your mom. It should be private. I’d love to meet her eventually, but I think that this first reunion should be between the two of you. Spend the day together. Work things out. I can find someplace to hang out for a while.”

He was grateful that she didn’t half-heartedly insist that he was wrong, and that it wouldn’t be totally awkward and weird to have him tag along. He was even more grateful, however, when she gestured at the keys still in the ignition.

“You should use the car then. I’ll use one of my dad’s, from the garage.” She grinned. “It looks like no one’s going to be using it for a while. Besides, it’s about time for you to be able to get around on your own.”

And it did turn out to be a really good thing. Clint let the car idle at the edge of Natasha’s driveway, considering whether he should go find another coffee shop, or if he should try and show up at Bruce’s place for the day. Or Tony’s. Or maybe he’d just go see a movie. Except he didn’t have any more cash on him, so a couple of those were out the window.

Gods, what if he ran out of gas. He wouldn’t be able to fill it up. Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea after all.

His thoughts were interrupted by his phone buzzing. He pushed his foot down harder on the brake so he could reach across the consul and snag it from where it lay. The text was from Steve, which was unexpected, and Clint hurried to open it.

_If anyone’s available, you should come over. Friend of mine would like to meet you all._

Well, damn. He thought about turning back around and heading back to pick up Natasha before she left for her mom’s, but then he laughed at himself. She had her own thing. He could do this on his own.

Driving was weird. Not that he couldn’t drive – he’d had his license sitting uselessly in his wallet for over a year – but it had been long enough that the feeling was strange. Navigating was stranger still, but he’d been driven along the route from Natasha’s to Steve’s often enough that he knew where to go.

A few minutes later, he was pulling up behind Tony’s custom-modified used-to-be-a-Mazda. He struggled out of Natasha’s car and carefully walked up the path to the door. It was opened by an enthusiastic Tony before Clint had even a moment to reach for the doorbell.

“Clint! Hey, you missed a hell of a day at school, but then Natasha wasn’t there either, so maybe you missed a hell of a school day to have a hell of a day at home? Huh?”

So Bruce hadn’t told him what was up, which Clint was mostly okay with. He smiled and said, “I don’t kiss and tell, Tony. Now move aside. I hear there’s someone I’m supposed to meet.”

“Yeah! Bruce is in there with them now, but don’t expect a lot. He mostly just clings to Steve.”

“Bruce is clinging to Steve?” Clint snarked with a grin, and Tony rolled his eyes.

“You know what I mean.”

Clint did, especially when he came around the corner. Tony hadn’t been exaggerating. Bucky was literally clinging to Steve. They were seated on the couch together, and Steve was sitting pretty normally, feet on the floor and back against the chair and all. Bucky, however, had his feet pulled up onto the couch in front of him, and he was facing Steve, rather than out into the room. His fingers were wrapped tightly in Steve’s sleeve, and he didn’t look like he was letting go any time soon.

“Hey, Steve,” Clint greeting. The older teen seemed to be pretending nothing was abnormal, so Clint took his cue from there. “What’s up? This is Bucky, right?”

“Yeah,” Steve said, turning a little to look at the teen in questions. “This is my boyfriend, Bucky.”

Boyfriend, huh. Yeah, that seemed about right for Steve. Hell, the guy had probably been calling Bucky his boyfriend in his head for the last year, even though he was MIA. Just the way that kind of thing went with guys like Steve.

“Hey, Bucky,” Clint said, trying to keep his voice from doing the “I’m talking to very young children” thing. He doubted it would be appreciated from anyone in the room.

“Yo,” Bucky said, not taking his eyes off Steve’s shirt.

“Can you shake his hand?” Steve asked gently, and Bucky rolled his eyes.

“I can shake his fucking hand,” Bucky said, with more energy than Clint had expected. “I’m not completely useless.”

As if to prove it, he stuck his hand out in Clint’s direction, and Clint shook it gently and then stepped back again. Bucky was looking at him now, though he didn’t seem likely to move much for the foreseeable future.

“I wasn’t sure,” Steve apologized. “After Tony. And I don’t think you’re useless.”

“Tony is a fucking whirlwind. He was different.”

Clint turned to Tony and raised his eyebrows.

“You scared him?” he said. “Way to go, Tony.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose! Besides, everyone was treating the guy like glass. Would have been driving me up the wall.”

“What did he do?” Clint asked.

“He was fine,” Bucky protested, again more loudly than Clint had anticipated. “I just don’t do great with people coming at me really quickly.”

Clint grinned and said, “Well then you and I are probably going to get along just fine. I’ve never been known for coming quickly. I can hold out and go slow for a long time.”

Tony snorted from behind him, and even Bruce cracked a smile. But the real miracle was the small grin that flashed over Bucky’s face, before it disappeared again.

“Aren’t you fucking hilarious?” he said to Clint, meeting his eye more easily this time.

“I try,” Clint said.

***

They spent a slow languid day in the house. Bucky got to the point that he was comfortable enough with other people nearby that he faced forward again, though he never did let go of Steve’s sleeve.

Natasha showed up several hours later, and Clint grinned at Bruce’s expression when they met for a brief kiss before moving into the living room. The arrival of a new person set Bucky back a bit, and he drew his feet up again, but they didn’t stay like that for long. And Steve didn’t seem worried, so no one else was either.

The whole thing was a little ridiculous, honestly. Given everything that had happened – not just to Bucky but in the last couple days in general – there should have been a lot more tension in the room. Bucky probably needed professional help. Natasha probably deserved to be arrested for assault with a deadly weapon. Bruce the same, minus the deadly weapon part. Hell, Clint was technically driving around a stolen car.

None of it mattered.

At one point, Natasha drew him out onto the back porch for a quick discussion. Apparently her mother was living in an apartment with a few other women, and seemed happy. However, she had readily accepted Natasha’s offer to come live in Natasha’s new college house. And it was definitely one of those things that her father “didn’t need to know.”

“Also,” she added carefully. “That house is pretty big. There are still rooms in there that aren’t going to be used, at this rate.”

“Yeah?” Clint said. “Maybe you’ll make friends at school, and you can roommate-up. Or you could put up a craigslist ad?”

“Yeah,” Natasha agreed. “Or, I was thinking, you could just come with me.” She was twisting her hands in distress. “I mean, I think my dad thought like you were saying. That I’d get some girls to come stay with me, like a sorority thing or something. But I’d rather have you, honestly.”

And honestly, staring at Natasha’s face in the setting sun, recognizing the insanity of the last several days, part of Clint still believe the whole relationship was doomed. That their worlds were just too different. That he would never be good enough for Natasha and that she would never be stable enough for him.

The other part of him, however, firmly told that lying-son-of-a-bitch part of him to shut the fuck up and, for one miraculous moment, it did.

“I’d love to,” Clint smiled. “Sounds like a blast. See, there’s this girl there that I like.”

“That you like?” Natasha smirked. “That doesn’t seem like a very good reason to move to another state.”

“Sorry,” Clint laughed gently. “My bad. I meant to say, there’s this girl there that I love.”

“Much better,” Natasha purred, and she leaned up and kissed him softly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Weeee. That ended up being more of a roller-coaster than than I'd expected. Hope you all had fun. Anyway, as always, you can find me on my [tumblr](http://polyamoryavengers.tumblr.com/) for Marvel stuff and oneshots.


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